Rails spinoffs - Nov 2006 - Merge, Compact Ofuscate or Compress Javascript Lib ?

Hi !,

A little question about JS Lib manipulation...

- I found that DOJO toolkit gives a DOJO Compressor jar file to
compress JavaScript
http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/compressor_system.html

- On the other hand there''s no docs in Prototype or Scriptaculous and
prototype files are merged.

Why ???

1. Compacting file will reduce bandwidth but is it useful with a
server that gzip .js ?
2. Merging files will reduce browser request but they are cached by browser ?

So ? Why doing this ?

If a JS Lib contains lots of comments and spaces, would that influence
the JS Compiler/Interpreter ?

Does any body benchmark a difference between loading and using a big
JS Files with lots of comments and the same striped ?

Best Regards,
Jp

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On Nov 24, 10:28 am, "Jean-Philippe Encausse"
<J...-vcK5r0oTKUrk1uMJSBkQmQ@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> 1. Compacting file will reduce bandwidth but is it useful with a
> server that gzip .js ?
You can compact (pack) your .js, you can gzip it, but why not both? If
you do both, the size goes down drastically. And remember, lots of
people prefer just to pack the files and not gzip them because IE had
(has??) problems decompressing received files.
> 2. Merging files will reduce browser request but they are cached by browser
?
Nevertheless, merging reduces the server load. Caching is great but
it''s not forever, and you must think of first-time visitors, too.
> If a JS Lib contains lots of comments and spaces, would that influence
> the JS Compiler/Interpreter ?
Of course not. Comments have no effect on the code and whitespace is
rarely significant in JavaScript. Even if you don''t put semicolons (;)
on the end of your lines (which you don''t have to), when using Dojo
ShrinkSafe online version you can safely tick the checkbox to remove
whitespace - its parser that packs the code is not dumb.

My last site has 10 .css files that take up more than 30KB. Packed and
gzipped they are contained in a single file and weight just over 6KB.
It has 106KB worth of JavaScript across 6 files - packing and gzipping
brings that down below 40KB in a single file. I don''t need to benchmark
this to know it was a bloody smart thing to do.

--
Mislav


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Hi,
> My last site has 10 .css files that take up more than 30KB. Packed and
> gzipped they are contained in a single file and weight just over 6KB.
> It has 106KB worth of JavaScript across 6 files - packing and gzipping
> brings that down below 40KB in a single file. I don''t need to
benchmark
> this to know it was a bloody smart thing to do.

Yes, it''s clean, smart, reduce server load on the 1st request, but
that''s all...
My question in fact is: This doesn''t improve browsing, code running in
any way ?
(Well, Only for the first request but not hundreds later ...)
> and you must think of first-time visitors, too.
Yes it depends of the web site. Less important for an Intranet people
use every day ?

Regards,
Jp

-- 
Jean-Philippe Encausse - R&D Jalios SA
Jp [at] encausse.net - http://www.encausse.com - http://www.jalias.com
GTalk: jp.encausse [at] gmail.com - SMS: sms [at] jp.encausse.net
Mob: +33 6 82 12 56 99 Jalios: +33 1 39 23 92 83 Tel: +33 1 39 18 90 15
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* Jean-Philippe Encausse wrote (24/11/06 15:55):
> Hi,
> 
>> My last site has 10 .css files that take up more than 30KB. Packed and
>> gzipped they are contained in a single file and weight just over 6KB.
>> It has 106KB worth of JavaScript across 6 files - packing and gzipping
>> brings that down below 40KB in a single file. I don''t need to
benchmark
>> this to know it was a bloody smart thing to do.
> 
> 
> Yes, it''s clean, smart, reduce server load on the 1st request, but
that''s all...
> My question in fact is: This doesn''t improve browsing, code
running in
> any way ?
> (Well, Only for the first request but not hundreds later ...)
Merging all your js files into one helps (I think) when you have users
with high latency. A browser makes a request to the server for a js file
saying "if modified since <cached version''s
timestamp>". The server
replies with a 304 "not modified". The HTML spec says that a browser
should only make 2 requests at a time to one server, and IE is compliant
in this respect.
So in a high-latency environment you ought to see bigger delays if you
have many js files compared to just one *even* if the js files are
cached (so the size of the file isn''t significant). The delays should
be
worse in IE than many other browsers, because it complies with the HTML
standard while they don''t.
At least, that''s my understanding. I''d like to know if
it''s wrong.

In a low-latency, high-bandwidth environment I doubt you''d notice a
difference most of the time. The extra speed you get from gzipping might
even be lost due to the extra processing overhead at both the client and
server.

Sorry - no benchmark info available, but I make sure that all js is
compressed (via a js code compressor), put into one file, and gzipped in
transit.

Chris

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There is a good read on the Y! User Interface blog:
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/11/28/performance-research-part-1/


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Am 24.11.2006 um 12:42 schrieb Mislav:
>
> My last site has 10 .css files that take up more than 30KB. Packed and
> gzipped they are contained in a single file and weight just over 6KB.
> It has 106KB worth of JavaScript across 6 files - packing and gzipping
> brings that down below 40KB in a single file. I don''t need to  
> benchmark
> this to know it was a bloody smart thing to do.

What about the overhead for ungzipping client-side? Note that this  
will probably
only slower if you have a _very_ fast connection, but who knows...? :)


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