Nowadays web sites and web applications tend to be more and more JavaScript driven which results in humongous JavaScript files. It’s not uncommon to have several 100 of bytes of JavaScript on a site. Of course web browsers cache stuff like JavaScript so that it only is requested from the server once. But judging from the visitor logs at work most people only visit our site once a month or so which means that cache will expire and all those scripts has to be requested upon the first visit.
Now, there are several ways to compact JavaScripts: Packer, YUI Compressor, Shrink Safe, jsmin and many more. Some of these just remove redundant white space and comments, some obfuscates the code and shortens variable and function names and what not. Many of these scripts and programs are very fine but they require you to manually minify your scripts, and that’s just a hassle!
But since we use Roxen CMS at work things get much easier if you write your own Roxen filter module which automatically minifies JavaScripts on the fly, given they meet certain criteria. And so I did!
I ported the original jsmin code written in C to Pike. Then it was just a matter of creating a simple filter module for Roxen. And then it was all done.
You can use two criteria to determine if a script should be minified or not:
- Path glob: In the module settings you can specify any number of directory globs or full paths. If a requested JavaScript either is in a directory matching a glob or is a direct match it will be minified.
-
Query string variable: In the module settings you can define a variable name that if exists as a query string variable in the request the JavaScript will be minified. So:
<script type="text/javascript" src="myscript.js?jsmin=1"></script>
will minify
myscript.js
And that’s that!
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