I'm stuck in a bit of dilemma on how to get around this and was hoping someone would point me in the right direction.
I am trying to cut down on the size of css and javascript files to improve our website's performance. But the problem is, on deployment, we simply upload our current svn repository's latest development version onto the server.
I am finding it hard to add that extra step for every developer to minify files before every change, as it adds a risk for negligence and human error.
I was thinking about having the readable version of files on the server anyway, but having some kind of file monitor that will execute a minifier when a file is changed, and update the file used by the website. Has anyone implemented this before?
EDIT
We're currently running on ASP.Net 2.0, Windows Server 2003
If you are using .net on the server, you could also try RequestReduce available on Nuget. It minies and bundles your css and js and also sprites css background images. It does it on the fly so your devs don't have to do this as an extra step. As long as you have some kind of versioning in place that changes the css/js url when it is changed, RequestReduce will automatically detect the change and process the file. It does all of this in the background and there fore does not affect the response time. If the files are not versioned via the url, RequestProduce provides a dashboard where you can flush its cache. RequestReduce can be deployed with absolutely no code changes and hardly any config in most use cases.
If you are using ASP.NET, try MBCompression library - it minify files automatically and you don't need do it manually:
Related
I am new to NuxtJS and JavaScript frameworks in particular. To host the files on an online server I need to generate static files. Even if I make a small change on one file I have to re-upload all the files again. Is that productive? Normally I can open the server and make changes to one file and upload it. But here I have to upload all files everytime.
Yes.
Some of the reasons why:
Your generated files are not supposed to be versioned, so any changes you make there, won't (shouldn't) be committed and pushed to git.
If you change the generated files and forget to change the actual code, the next time you generate the files again, those changes will be overwritten.
It's not going to be easy at all to make even small changes directly into the generated files.
You shouldn't be making changes straight into production. Also, the changes you make there shouldn't be reflected in your localhost, so you're going to have version conflicts pretty soon if you keep doing it like that.
There is, however, a way to make all of that easier. With continuous integration/continuous deployment, you can have it all set up so for every change committed/merged into a specific branch on you version control will be built and automatically pushed to your production server.
It seems to me like you are not familiar with version control (mainly git) nor continuous integration, so here's some topics on the matter:
GIT:
Learn git concepts, not commands
5 Free Courses to Learn Git and Github in Depth
Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment
Understanding Continuous Integration
Explain Continuous Integration Like Im Five
I'm a UI developer with very less knowledge in server side. My current work included Oracle Weblogic server, with Java coding language.
The problem is, for each minor change that I make in UI file like js or html, I need to stop the server and rebuild the entire solution to see the change. This is taking a huge effort from a UI perspective.
Is there any way to work on UI files without building each time ?
Go to _WL_user directory (e.g. Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\<your _domain_name>\servers\<server_name>\tmp\_WL_user\<application_name>). In one of folders below (e.g. <...>\war\WEB-INF\jsp), you should find your UI files which you can modify. After reloading a page results should be visible in a browser.
Well, you could just connect a debugger to your server from your IDE so changes you make are pushed remotely, but it's not an elegant solution (and there are things it can't handle and you'll need to bounce the server anyway)
Use Split Development Environment in exploded folder. Then, all you need is to write one file .beabuild.txt and map virtual JS/CSS paths to your source folders.
I've got some ASP.NET that I'm deploying as an Azure cloud service. The javascript files have comments in them that I'd like not to be visible to anyone consuming the JS. I'm taking advantage of ASP.NET bundling and minification:
http://www.asp.net/mvc/overview/performance/bundling-and-minification
This seems to be a nice solution in that it removes all comments during the minifcation process. But I can't count on the fact that the user won't directly point his or her browser directly to the individual, original js files. I'm trying to figorue out how to prevent the user from pulling the js files directly (forcing them to pull only a bundle), in order to prevent viewing comments. Is there a way to implement a black list of files that can't be downloaded? If not, I was thinking of adding a series of random characters to the name of each js file. Lastly, if that doesn't seem like a good idea, I would investigate injecting something into the VS build process to strip comments on publish.
Any thoughts would be welcome.
You can use blockviewhandler in a web.config in the folder your js is in. Explicitly whitelist any files that are OK to download and then block the rest.
There's an example in this question:
Where to put view-specific javascript files in an ASP.NET MVC application?
I think you can modify your deployment process. To your production server upload only the minified js files but to your test/dev server upload everything.
Recently I received a package with web page. I see inside (beside normal html and js files) there are some JS files. It looks like this:
4A3674A3247236B3C8294D2378462378.cache.js
FE728493278423748230C48234782347.cache.js
compilation-mappings.txt
Inside .js files I see Javascript which is obfuscated or minified. Inside compilation-mappings.txt the cache.js are referenced. Are these files generated by some kind of WEB IDE? Unfortunately I have no chance to get information how this wep page was developed.
That is a web project coded in Java and compiled to JS using the GWT project tools.
GWT compiler does a lot of the work you would have to do manually when coding JS by hand, and some other tasks which are almost impossible in a normal JS project: obfuscate, compress, death-code removal, different optimization per browser, renaming of the scripts, code splitting, etc.
What you have in your app is the result of this compilation:
First you should have a unique index.html file, because GWT is used to produce RIA (Rich Internet Applications) also known as SPI (Single Page Interface).
The unique html file should have a reference to a javascript file named application_name.nocache.js. Note the .nocache. part, meaning that the web server should set the appropriate headers, so as it is not cached by proxies nor browsers. This file is very small becaust it just have the code to identify the browser and ask for the next javascript file.
This first script knows which NNNN.cache.js have to load each browser. The NNNN prefix is a unique number which is generated when the app is compiled, and it is different for each browser. GWT supports 6 different browser platforms, so normally you would have 6 files like this. Note the .cache. part of the name, meaning that this files could be cached for ever. They are large files because have all the code of your application.
So the normal workflow of your app is that the browser ask for the index.html file which can be cached. This file has the script tag to get the small start script applicaton.nocache.js which should be always requested to the server. It has just the code for loading the most recent permutation for your browser NNNN.cache.js which will be downloaded cached in your browser for ever.
You have more info about this stuff here
The goals of this naming convention is that the next time the user goes to the app, it will be in cache the index.html and NNNN.cache.js files, asking only for the application.nocache.js which is really small. It guarantees that the user loads always the most recent version of the app, that the browser will download just once the code of your app, that proxies or cache devices do not break your app when releasing a new version, etc.
Said that, it is almost impossible to figure out what the code does inspecting the javascript stuff because of the big obfuscation. You need the original .java files to understand the code or make modifications.
I can't say for sure, but often a string will be attached to the name of a javascript file so that when a new version is deployed clients will not use a cached version of the old one.
(ie, if you have myScript.js and change it, the browser will say "I already have myScript.js, Idon't need it. If it goes from being myScript1234.js to myScript1235.js the browser will go fetch it)
It is possible the framework in use generated those files as part of it's scheme to handle client side cache issues. Though without knowing more details of what framework they used, there's no way of knowing for sure.
I have had some thoughts recently on how to handle shared javascript and css files across a web application.
In a current web application that I am working on, I got quite a large number of different javascripts and css files that are placed in an folder on the server. Some of the files are reused, while others are not.
In a production site, it's quite stupid to have a high number of HTTP requests and many kilobytes of unnecessary javascript and redundant css being loaded. The solution to that is of course to create one big bundled file per page that only contains the necessary information, which then is minimized and sent compressed (GZIP) to the client.
There's no worries to create a bundle of javascript files and minimize them manually if you were going to do it once, but since the app is continuously maintained and things do change and develop, it quite soon becomes a headache to do this manually while pushing out new updates that features changes to javascripts and/or css files to production.
What's a good approach to handle this? How do you handle this in your application?
I built a library, Combres, that does exactly that, i.e. minify, combine etc. It also automatically detects changes to both local and remote JS/CSS files and push the latest to the browser. It's free & open-source. Check this article out for an introduction to Combres.
I am dealing with the exact same issue on a site I am launching.
I recently found out about a project named SquishIt (see on GitHub). It is built for the Asp.net framework. If you aren't using asp.net, you can still learn about the principles behind what he's doing here.
SquishIt allows you to create named "bundles" of files and then to render those combined and minified file bundles throughout the site.
CSS files can be categorized and partitioned to logical parts (like common, print, vs.) and then you can use CSS's import feature to successfully load the CSS files. Reusing of these small files also makes it possible to use client side caching.
When it comes to Javascript, i think you can solve this problem at server side, multiple script files added to the page, you can also dynamically generate the script file server side but for client side caching to work, these parts should have different and static addresses.
I wrote an ASP.NET handler some time ago that combines, compresses/minifies, gzips, and caches the raw CSS and Javascript source code files on demand. To bring in three CSS files, for example, it would look like this in the markup...
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="/getcss.axd?files=main;theme2;contact" />
The getcss.axd handler reads in the query string and determines which files it needs to read in and minify (in this case, it would look for files called main.css, theme2.css, and contact.css). When it's done reading in the file and compressing it, it stores the big minified string in server-side cache (RAM) for a few hours. It always looks in cache first so that on subsequent requests it does not have to re-compress.
I love this solution because...
It reduces the number of requests as much as possible
No additional steps are required for deployment
It is very easy to maintain
Only down-side is that all the style/script code will eventually be stored within server memory. But RAM is so cheap nowadays that it is not as big of a deal as it used to be.
Also, one thing worth mentioning, make sure that the query string is not succeptible to any harmful path manipulation (only allow A-Z and 0-9).
What you are talking about is called minification.
There are many libraries and helpers for different platforms and languages to help with this. As you did not post what you are using, I can't really point you towards something more relevant to yourself.
Here is one project on google code - minify.
Here is an example of a .NET Http handler that does all of this on the fly.