concatenation & minification

[h5bp]

concatenation & minification

[xonecas]

We could do more with the dependency management, offer regular concatenation, browserify, and even ender.js

app.use(h5bp({
  scripts: {
    order: ['app.js', ...],
    concat: 'browserify | ...',
    minify: true
  }
});

Let's go for it.

[ngryman]

Ok, I'll begin w/ the Browserify impl.

[ngryman]

Here is a first draft of script concatenation using CommonJS : feature/concat

I am using Webmake instead of Browserify because it seems the last one removed their native express middleware and the API is not very comfy...
Webmake seems to be pretty reliable and well maintained.

I will wait until we implement the cache feature before merging it to develop. Actually it concatenates the file on-the-fly for each request ... which is not what we want.

[ngryman]

Another thing, internally h5bp has now layers which are much like middlewares.

A good thing is that we can handle these layers internally like we want and we do not pollute the application with a bunch of internal middlewares. Also the idea that the h5bp middleware could register other middlewares is strange.

But, it makes me think that, at some point, this project could mutate into a collection of several category middlewares that could be configured together correctly with the createServer function. h5bp would become something like an express superset.

For now, I think the one-multi-purpose-middleware is a good approach because it is just simple for the user :-)

[ngryman]

CommonJS done. I have embeded a basic file caching system for now, to avoid concatenation on each request.
So this is meant to be used w/ cache busting to reflect file changes.

This expiry project has the good idea of including a url helper for connect / express apps. I think we should also propose something like this.

Now I'll go with other types of concatenations:

• AMD
• basic: a list of files w/ globs supported (/**/*.js).

[bnjmnt4n]

I'm not very sure what the syntax is. Can someone help?

[ngryman]

@D10 What do you mean?

[bnjmnt4n]

If you have a few files and you want to concat it to main.js, how do you specify it?

[ngryman]

I've just finished AMD impl.

@D10
Well for now you should have a main.js file that requires its dependencies itself like this:

• using CommonJS: https://github.com/h5bp/node-server-config/blob/develop/test/fixtures/commonjs.js.
• using AMD : https://github.com/h5bp/node-server-config/blob/develop/test/fixtures/amd.js.

In the h5bp config you would just specify the path of your main script:

scripts: {
  concat: ['scripts/main.js'],
  method: 'amd'
}

There will also be a more basic concatenation method more or like grunt-contrib-concat task.

I will make a PR before integrating all these changes to master to discuss it w/ you guys :)