Question

I’m planning an extensible web app where base objects are extended by JavaScript modules which plug in. Each JavaScript object may just be an independent bit of code, or I might be building a large object to simulate a module namespace. I’ll be using a Django back-end and Backbone.js, since you asked.

The system should be easily modular, so adding a new module should be a question of just dropping in another file or database row or whatever. The person installing the module shouldn’t have to edit a large JavaScript file manually (or run a special script, in an ideal world).

I have two options: just serve each JS file separately or get the server to assemble them. The first option will get ungainly when a large number of plugins is reached.

I’m looking into the best way to implement the second option: assembling a JavaScript file from a lot of small JavaScript snippets. I could just do some blind string concatenation, but there may be a Python library that can do this and take account of problems I haven’t foreseen.

Answer 1

For one of my projects I simply wrote a small build script which handles both CSS and JS files.

For JS it reads the list of JS files from a text file, concatenates all scripts and submits them to google for minification.

For CSS I take my central CSS file and recursively replace all @import statements with the referenced file (since i only use absolute paths no path rewriting is necessary); after this I have a single CSS file which is then run throuh cssmin.

Since you are using Django you could probably write such a script in a way to make it easily callable through manage.py