I am developing a single page application. It is all pure html / css / javascript and I am just starting to set up my gulp file. I figured out how to concatenate and minify my css and javascript into one main file and I just am wondering on workflow with this scenario.
The pros :
its going to make my app run faster
The Cons :
During development on my localhost, it makes it hard to track down line numbers and files when its minified / concatenated.
Some questions:
Has anyone developed a good gulp workflow that allows concatenation /
minification that doesn't impede workflow during production?
That serves only concatenated / minified file on staging or live server?
Or do you just wait until close to testing the site and then allow concatenation / minification and change all your links to point to
the single main css / js file?
Note : keep in mind this is a single page application without any server-side coding or JS MVC
Thanks for any suggestions,
david
I have one less file which in turn imports multiple less files. Is there a way to get entire compiled css from that less life ? Which I can reference in an html file?
Yes, that's basically how less is always used.
Assuming your main less file is called styles.less, you'd run:
lessc styles.less > styles.css
to get the combined results.
See http://lesscss.org/#using-less for more details and options.
some stats before i can state the situation,
total JS code = 122 MB
minified = 36 MB
minified and gzip = 4 MB
I would like to get the entire 4 MB down in one shot (with a loading progress indicator on the page), uncompress them, but not parse them yet. We don't want the code expanding in browsers memory when a lot of it might not be required at this point. The parsing should happen when a script tag with the corresponding js file name is encountered.
Intention: faster one shot download of js files, but keeping the behaviour unchanged from the browser perspective.
Do any such solutions exist? Am I even thinking sane?
If yes, I know how to get the gzip, I would like to know how to keep them in the browser cache so that when a script tag is encountered the browser doesn't fire a XMLHttpRequest for it again.
The trick is to leverage HTTP caching directives. For a starter take a look at this. You should only need to fetch your JS code once because you can safely set the cache directive to instruct the browser to hold on to the JS file indefinitely (subject to space). Indefinitely in this context typically means the year 2035.
When you're ready to update all your browser-side caches with a new version of the JS file simply use a cache busting Query String. Any serial number or time and date will do, or a simple version number eg;
<script src="/js/myfile.js?v2.1"></script>
Some minification frameworks handle the cache-busting for you. A good technique for example is those that MD5 the contents and use that as the cache buster query string. That way, whenever your source JS changes the browser will request the new version (because the QS is embedded in your HTML script tag) and then cache for as long as possible again.
XMLHttpRequest will honour the caching primities you set.
In the other part of your question, I believe what you're asking is whether you can download one combined script file and then only refer to parts of it with individual script tags on the page. No - I don't believe you can do that. If you want to refer to individual files you would need to have a HTTP URL and caching directives for each piece of GZIPped content you want to use separately. However, you might find this is as much or maybe even more performant than one big file at first depending on how much parallelisation you can achieve.
A neat trick here is to pre-load a lot of what you need. Google have been doing this on the home page for years. Basically, they pre-load stacks of resources (images certainly, but possibly also JS). So whilst you're thinking about what search query to enter, they are already loading the cache up with stuff you'll want on the subsequent page.
So you could use XMLHttpRequest to fetch your JS files (without parsing them) well before you need them. Then by the time your <script/> tag refers to them they'll already be downloaded and you just need to parse them.
In addition to cirrus's point about using HTTP caching, you could break that still-pretty-large 4mb file down and only load them when that functionality is required.
It's more HTTP requests, but 4MB is a big hit in one go.
Suggest something like require.js to load in the appropriate files when they are needed:
http://requirejs.org/docs/start.html
I have a large HTML file being generated for a report at the moment (around 2-3 mb) and this file is going to be transferred a lot of times. It is not being access through any form of a web host, it is just a file being accessed by a network, but the network is all around the world and therefore not fast everywhere.
I know about gzip compression, but from the looks of it that will only work with an apache web server or something similar to configure it via the .htaccess file. I have already stripped the white spaces from the HTML file, my question is besides just zipping it up in a standard archive, what else can I do to minimize the size of the file?
Thanks, and I will be happy to answer any other questions.
You can certainly look at the HTML structure itself to see if you can reduce the number of tags themselves. For example to you have a bunch of nested table structures that could be replaced? Do you have inline styles that could be put into a separate stylesheet? Do you have any javascript content which could be put into a separate file?
I does not think that you can compress it without a proper web server, because is the web server that say to the browser that the file is to unzip in the HTTP response.
If the format is the greater part of the file (i.e. there are more tags and script than the text) you can use a css to minimize the size.
If the data is the greater, so information are the more than tags, I suggest you to use a web server (also with the Microsoft IIS you can compress it)
But, if possible, consider also to split the data in several file, with different level of details for example
It is possible to contain compressed data within the HTML file and use a JavaScript to dynamically compress the data as the page is rendered using a JavaScript implementation of the Decompression module. See this answer for references: JavaScript implementation of Gzip
Is it possible to reuse HTML tags across multiple files, headers and footers for example? Placing them in separate files adds an extra HTTP request, that I'd like to avoid.
I don't want to replicate minor changes in headers and footers across every html file every time a change request comes along.
HTML is not a programming language - it's a markup language. You don't do object-oriented HTML because it isn't object based. This is the whole purpose of a server-side language, so you can make include files and use them in your server-side application.
If you have Apache however, you can use server-side includes which don't require a programming language such as PHP, but it's less flexible:
<!--#include virtual="/footer.html" -->
First, HTML isn't even a programming language, so it's impossible to have "Object-oriented" HTML.
Placing them in separate files adds an
extra HTTP request, that I'd like to
avoid.
If this is the reason for your "without server side code" requirement, then you are mistaken - the client does not fetch the templates that make up a page separately; the server side code will return a single HTML page to the client.
If, on the other hand, you don't have the option to run any server-side code at all and have to make do with static HTML pages, then there's only two options I can think of: iframes (which do result in separate HTTP requests, of course), or some sort of tool that basically runs the equivalent of server-side code to embed your reused templates everywhere and spits out the result to be uploaded to the server. You can have this effect by running a PHP/Apache-with-SSI/JSP/Whatever server on your development machine and using wget to make a static snapshot of the pages.
What I want to do is this. The files can be scattered during development. But I when I'm ready to release, a toolkit should compile the included files into a single html file.
You can use a template language/engine, such as jinja2.
You can layout files in a certain hierarchy, and have templates inherit from other templates, and include other templates, and define reusable macros (closest thing to what you referred to as "reusable tags").
What I want to do is this. The files can be scattered during development. But I when I'm ready to release, a toolkit should compile the included files into a single html file
I know this is late, but CodeKit's .kit language lets you do exactly what you were saying.
http://incident57.com/codekit/help.php
I think the language you've chosen in your question (object oriented HTML) is actually masking the real issue you have here...
What I want to do is this. The files can be scattered during development. But I when I'm ready to release, a toolkit should compile the included files into a single html file.
This sounds like a job for a preprocessor, I don't believe it has anything to do with your webserver or server side technology, as this is a step which would happen before deployment.
There's a number of text pre-processors available eg M4 - hell you could even use the C compiler pre-processor if you wanted. A quick google reveals that there are specialised pre-processors for HTML as well....
Automatic file inclusion, automatic escaping, and whatnot that can be done with automatically inserted headers and footers, chosen based on path patterns.
Seems to fit the bill?
Sure . But these would have to be separate ajax calls form the client . There are lot of javascript mvc frameworks like that do that .
If you want to have include files during development, then compile them into free-standing HTML files, you could do that by spidering your development server with wget: whatever server-side technology you use will combine the files and return the HTML, which wget will saves as one file.
As everithing is object over the technology but not directly, indirectly interacting with the object that are created at different level as per security implementation.
You can do this.
I just released a mature framework called Hypertag that is, in fact, Object Oriented HTML. It is entirely client-side, in continuous development, and allows for very interesting, yet HTML-compatible, advanced solutions for logic and layout.
See http://hypertag.io for more.