Question

I am having Java EE application in which I was using ANT in order to do all my tasks. For the minification of JavaScript I was using YUI Compressor and its ANT plugin and used to compress my files during build. Now my problem is that I want to use the default eclipse build and achieve the same result. I want to know that whether is it possible to minify the JavaScript used in my project during the time eclipse builds my project or may be when it creates a war archive ?

Answer 1

I’m personnaly using ant, together with Google’s closure compiler, to concatenate and minify all my CSS and javascript file when I’m building my Java EE application.

The steps are

• concatenate all css files in one
• concatenate all the js files
• apply minification on the js concatenated file

I have something like this :

<target name="minify-m3" depends="init">
    <description>build the compacted/minified version </description>
    <echo>Concatenating the css...</echo>
    <concat destfile="${somevar.dir}/pmc.concat.css">
        <fileset dir="${somevar.dir}/skins/contrast">
           <filename name="*.css"/>
           <not><filename name="**/pmc.concat.css"/></not>
      </fileset>
    </concat>

    <echo>Concatenating javascript...</echo>
    <concat destfile="${somevar.dir}/pmc.concat.js">
        <!-- Attention : ensure there is no  Unicode BOM in the files -->
        <!-- attention : keep js files in order! -->
        <filelist dir="src/webapp/m3">
            <file name="graphic_utils.js" />
            <file name="Rect.js" />
            ...
        </filelist>
    </concat>

    <echo>Concatenating using the Closure Compiler...</echo>
    <jscomp compilationLevel="simple" warning="quiet" debug="false" output="${somevar.dir}/pmc.min.js">
        <sources dir="src/webapp/m3">
            <file name="pmc.concat.js" />
        </sources>
    </jscomp>
    <echo>Finished</echo>
</target>