Re: JavaScript Compression

On 12/03/2008, at 1:06 PM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

I recently began looking at JavaScript compression options. Some of the
tools I tried obfuscate the code in addition to compressing it. All of
the tools I tried created code that wasn't runable, which seemed like an
irony to me. I finally created a CL command and RPG program to compress
all JavaScript files in one directory and output them to another. My
compression algorithm is pretty basic; It removes all comments and
attempts to remove unnecessary white space, but doesn't do anything
fancy to obfuscate the code. Is anybody else compressing their
JavaScript? Have a recommended tool?

Why don't you let the browser and server deal with the compression issue? Modern browsers usually send a request header indicating compression is handled (usually gzip or flate). Modern web servers will, or can be configured to, honour that request. Both those compression algorithms do a reasonable job.

Removing comments will help reduce the amount of data to compress but unless you've got LOTS of comments you may find the bandwidth reduction not worth the effort.

I thought most sites had given up on the idea of code obfuscation in Javascript--partly for the reason you encountered.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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