Re: JavaScript Compression

[Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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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