ElkArte Community Modern, Free, Powerful
Community building forum software

Was just wondering: back when the code for scrunching CSS and js files was being written, did you guys ever check out the code behind Bananascript? It's capable of knocking down jquery_1.11.2.min.js from 94kb to 52kb, which is quite an improvement on an already minified library.

As far as I got when testing anything, the resulting code always worked. I was using it for scrunching SMF js files for custom theming too.

Where's the code at? Just looks like a service.

Dunno where it's hiding. I know Arantor managed to reverse engineer it. Which he said was a bit of a mission. Could try asking him about it.

Or, you could just ask the dude who wrote it if he would be prepared to part with code for a good cause.

Since what it does is a sort of compression, wouldn't be easier to serve the files as gzip packages?

ETA: of course it doesn't mean it's easier because I always had problems in sending gzip instead of plain text files.

Never heard of it before ...

Certainly doing some form of compression wrapper, gzip or other.   I'm probably wrong but I think that would mean the browser has to uncompressed the file each time its used?  Or maybe it can uncompress it just once to the browser cache?

You save some amount of single time bandwidth (since the files are cached by the browser) at the expense of the computational overhead of uncompressing them.  Not sure which would end up better, probably chasing gnat farts.

What the site does is basically: convert all the js to a text string, find some repeated patterns and replace them with placeholders, then wrap everything into some code that, client-side, does the "counter replacement" putting back the repeated patterns and ends with an equivalent of eval(string_of_code).

Yeah, what Ema said, AFAICT. Makes for very small files without gzipping.

So it does require the client to "unpack" the JS file before it can be used, and perhaps each time ... interesting concept, not sure  about whats really better for the client, a few more bits or a bit more processing.

Dunno. If it aint done with CSS, I have no idea. I just thought it was interesting and was wondering if it was worthwhile.

It should give less load on the server, and less bandwidth usage. Client? Not so sure. I suppose I could drop the dude an email and ask.

I think we're better off without having the client do decompression at the Javascript level.