Question

We’re coming to a big release in a web project I work on, and I’m starting to think more and more about javascript/css performance and versioning. I’ve got a couple high level ideas so far:

1. Write (or customize) an http handler to do this for me. This would obviously have to handle caching as well to justify the on the fly IO that would occur.
2. Add these steps into a custom msbuild script that would be ran for deployment only.

I’m also looking at automatically generating config files for each of the servers I deploy to, which lends itself to the second idea. The major advantage I see with the first idea is that I could dynamically handle versioning (at least that’s what one of my links at the bottom says, I’ve yet to convince myself that this would actually work).

Anyway, I’m curious if any of these problems have already been solved. I’d love any feedback. Thanks!

Here are some resources that I’ve been looking at so far:

http://madskristensen.net/post/Combine-multiple-stylesheets-at-runtime.aspx
http://madskristensen.net/post/Remove-whitespace-from-stylesheets-and-JavaScript-files.aspx
http://www.west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/413878.aspx
http://svn.offwhite.net/trac/SmallSharpTools.Packer/wiki

Answer 1

You do this as part of the continuous integration build process you have.

Compare all JS to the previous checked inversion, for each that have changes, call out to the YUI Compressor on that JS file and name the output with the current revision number. Add that file to your repository, and change a config file to have the latest revision number for that js file. Then you will write a custom control that imports a js file. This control will either use the uncompressed js when running on a development machine, or the compressed file with the revision number from the config file when it is run on a deployed setup.