The module is quite mature at this point, and is used in production on many websites (including Box.net, which commissioned the initial work). The module supports the Content-Length header, Range and If-Range requests, ZIP-64 for large archives, and filename transcoding with iconv. Being written in C, it will probably use much less RAM than an equivalent Node.js module.
I have found that the hardest part of generating ZIP files on the fly has nothing to do with network programming; it's producing files that open correctly on all platforms, including Mac OS X's busted-ass BOMArchiveHelper.app.
The point wasn't that creating on the fly zips is new, it was that using pipeable steam abstractions is a composable way to build network servers, and nodejs is just something we found this easiest to express with.
Having a large number of stream primitives means you can easily wire up endpoints, for example say you wanted to output a large db query as xml, or consume and editing gigabytes of json, or consume, transcode and output a video.
You can by all means write a nginx module in C for each usecase and this is probably the right solution for very HEAVY specific loads.
But writing a C module is probably a barrier too high for many, whereas implementing a nodejs stream isn't. Respond to a few events, emit a few events and you have a module that can work with the hundreds of other stream abstractions available. (npm search stream)
You still need the specific domain knowledge (eg how zip headers work) and this is usually the complicated bit. mod_zip looks excellent, and I wonder if some of the domain knowledge of handling zips can be resused in zipstream.
https://github.com/evanmiller/mod_zip
The module is quite mature at this point, and is used in production on many websites (including Box.net, which commissioned the initial work). The module supports the Content-Length header, Range and If-Range requests, ZIP-64 for large archives, and filename transcoding with iconv. Being written in C, it will probably use much less RAM than an equivalent Node.js module.
I have found that the hardest part of generating ZIP files on the fly has nothing to do with network programming; it's producing files that open correctly on all platforms, including Mac OS X's busted-ass BOMArchiveHelper.app.