Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Using Closure JavaScript Optimization and Minification

Recently I attended cf.Objective(ANZ), a Melbourne based conference for Enterprise ColdFusion developers. A session which stuck with me was titled 'Speed Matters' and it was presented by Mark Stanton. Mark presented a compelling case for optimizing a web site's HTTP usage for a faster and more efficient experience for the user.

Now that I have rebooted my development environment in Ubuntu and Mac OS X I am looking forward to applying some HTTP optimization to my own site, My Web Brain. There are a lot of different areas I can (and will) target, but first off is JavaScript minification and optimization.

To get some experience with a new tool which did more than simply strip out comments and whitespace, I decided to try Google's Closure Compiler. Closure JavaScript Compiler is distributed as a simple jar file and works with standard input and output streams:

$java -jar compiler.jar < in.js > out.js

The compiler can also accept multiple JavaScript filenames from command line switches and output to a single combined file:

$java -jar compiler.jar --js in1.js --js in2.js > out.js

Closure Compiler has three level of optimization:

  • Remove WHITESPACE_ONLY - basically as per the venerable JSMin.
  • SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS - removes whitespace, shortens private variables and other provably safe changes to the code.
  • ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS - as per Simple Optimization but much more aggressive. This level relies on JSDoc comments to help the compiler understand which optimizations are safe for the code.

Passing the desired level optimization to the compiler is another switch:

$java -jar --compilation_level WHITESPACE_ONLY

You can read more about optimization levels and the differences here. Closure also helpfully provides warnings about poor or dangerous coding patterns. The compiler can also be accessed as a remote RESTful API, but I have not played with that yet.

Read the documentation for more information. For myself using closure compiler will likely be a gateway to learning about jsdoc, JavaScript code linting and better overall JavaScript coding. Awesome.

But wait up. How do you work with JavaScript code once you have thoroughly minified and optimized it? The short answer is that you don't. In an upcoming blog entry I will explain how I brought Closure Compiler into my build process.

1 comment:

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