Shibboleth Developers

[Andrew Petro <>]

Jasig uPortal developed some technology in the form of a ResourceServer 
webapp that does some good stuff for sensibly serving JavaScript (and 
CSS) resources at runtime.

https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPC/Resource+Server

That is, it's not just about minifying the JavaScript source; it's also 
about what URL you serve it from and what the browser believes about 
appropriate cache policies for that URL.  ResourceServer tries to 
navigate the straits of versioned URLs for aggressively compressed and 
cached static content.  It's working quite well for uPortal.

Note the example of using the YUI compressor Maven plugin:

https://source.jasig.org/resource-server/tags/resource-server-1.0.11/resource-server-content/

(in the pom.xml listed there).

The example, or possibly even adopting the technology whole hog, may be 
relevant here.

I agree with Halm's viewpoints on what to distribute where, that only 
real source code goes in source control, and that only auditable tools 
that build from source are advisable.

Best wishes,

Andrew



On 01/06/2011 02:58 AM, Halm Reusser wrote:
> On 05.01.11 17:34, Rod Widdowson wrote:
> > Thoughts?
>
> I suggest to check the yuicompressor-maven-plugin [1] which utilizes YUI
> [2]. Probably Google has similar tools.
> It supports compression (minify + ofuscate) as well as aggregation.
>
> About distribution:
> I suggest to put the source JS files into the -src dist and the
> compressed and aggregated one into the -bin dist.
>
> About version control:
> I suggest to only put source JS files to svn.
>
> About trust:
> Well do you trust your java compiler? In my opinion for such tasks a
> tool should be used which code is reviewable. So that an security
> auditor might to load the source, check, compile and verify the steps.
> Therefore I think a tool like YUI is better than some (uncontrolled)
> website like http://dean.edwards.name/packer/.
>
> -Halm
>
> [1] http://alchim.sourceforge.net/yuicompressor-maven-plugin/index.html
> [2] http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/