Some static .js and .css files in particular and dynamic JSON and XML responses can be quite large, and would benefit from being compressed to reduce load times and bandwidth usage.
There are several possible approaches:
1. Frontend httpd servers like Apache httpd can compress on-the-fly with mod_deflate for specific content-types:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_deflate.html
Sample configuration in httpd.conf:
2. We could set a gzip compression filter in jetty:
http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/documentation/current/gzip-filter.html