I cache the packed versions. Actually, I concatenate all of the scripts that
I need for a page, minify them (used to use packer, now I use YUImin), and
then cache that, all on the fly. So I have one script tag like:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/myscriptmerger/dimensions.js,sort.js,
myscript.js"></script>
On the first request, I merge the three scripts, minify them, write them out
to a cache file, and store the cache file path with the script names. Next
time I get these same scripts in this order, I serve out the cached version.
This has quite a few benefits: it allows me to have whatever scripts I need
on a given page, it keeps my scripts readable on the server while still
compressing them for the client, and it reduces the number of HTTP requests
necessary to load all of the scripts.
The only real downside is you may lose a little performance from things not
caching as much as they would if they were in separate files, so I don't
serve up jquery.js/interface.js/ext.js this way hoping that the browser will
cache them.
--Erik
On 8/15/07, Ganeshji Marwaha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Very cool... I will start using this technique right away...
>
> But my only concern is, since this technique compresses the file everytime
> it is requested, isn't it an overkill on the server's CPU?
>
> -GTG
>
> On 8/15/07, Stephan Beal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hi, all!
> >
> > i'm working on re-designing the web site for my mother's company,
> > which was horribly neglected/abused by the previous webmaster, and i
> > came across an interesting problem...
> >
> > A part of the refactoring is to use jQuery for parts of the site.
> > However, since all of the pages use the same site layout template
> > (which includes the headers/script tags) yet most of the site won't
> > actually use the JS features, i wanted to make the jQ download as tiny
> > as possible.
> >
> > Unfortunately, i don't have admin rights on my server so i cannot
> > activate mod_gzip/mod_deflate to gzip the stuff on the fly. But here's
> > an easy workaround...
> >
> > Create a PHP file called jquery.php:
> >
> > <?php
> > ob_start( 'ob_gzhandler' );
> > echo join('',file('jquery-1.1.3.1.pack.js'));
> > ob_end_flush();
> > ?>
> >
> > Now, in the main site layout template i have:
> >
> > <script type='text/javascript' src='/include/js/jquery.php'></script>
> >
> > Firebug confirms that the jQ transfer is then 12k, which is tolerable
> > for my purposes.
> >
> > It would be only a tiny amount of extra work to integrate the PHP port
> > of Dean Edwards' packer, such that the packing is done each time
> > jquery.php is called, but that seems like overkill to me.
> >
> > This approach could just as easily be used to combine all required JS
> > scripts on the fly (just be sure to insert a ';' after each one to
> > accommodate scripts which don't have them), then gzip them, to help
> > reduce the overall download overhead.
> >
> >
>
