Deflater enhancements

[Stephen Colebourne]

I've been trying to use Deflater today and found it rather tricky. Two
thoughts...

1) The class level Javadoc specifies a fixed size byte array of 100.
http://download.java.net/jdk8/docs/api/java/util/zip/Deflater.html

>From what I can tell from other searching and basic common sense, this
cannot be right as the output size could well be bigger than 100.
However, there is no real information in the Deflater class as to how
the class is supposed to be used. I don't believe that kind of broken
example is helpful.

The best I found was
http://java.dzone.com/articles/how-compress-and-uncompress
which proposed a loop:
Deflater deflater = new Deflater();
deflater.setInput(data);
ByteArrayOutputStream outputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream(data.length);
deflater.finish();
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
while (!deflater.finished()) {
 int count = deflater.deflate(buffer); // returns the generated code... index
 outputStream.write(buffer, 0, count);
}
outputStream.close();
byte[] output = outputStream.toByteArray();

Neither example call deflater.end(), which I believe to be a mistake as well.

Is my analysis correct? Should I raise a bug for better documentation?
(this appears to affect Inflater as well)

2) Even with the Javadoc change, the API is still far too complex.

As a user, all I want is something like:
 byte[] compressed = Deflater.deflate(input, options...)
and similar for Inflater.

(I actually want to compress a String, and an override to handle that
would be useful as well)

Any thoughts on adding a convenience method to make the API a lot
easier? Can I raise a bug for that?

Stephen