Saturday, July 14, 2012

Building CanJS with Maven (or Ant)

CanJS and other similar JavaScript frameworks are great for creating modular applications and keeping source files small and cohesive, but we all (should) know that when it comes to web site performance, it's important to keep the total number of downloads to a minimum. This becomes especially important when you start to factor in mobile devices, where the cost per connection is much higher than on desktop browsers.

Luckily, CanJS (and most of the others, I might add) includes the ability through StealJS of compressing and concatenating all of the source files for your application into a single production.js, as well as doing the same for your CSS files, into a single minified production.css.  When you use the generators which come with DoneJS / JavascriptMVC to create a new app, you'll notice in the folder structure a scripts folder, which contains a build.js and build.html. Steal uses Rhino to load the build HTML file, which includes a single call to load the main steal.js core and bootstrap your app (e.g. ../steal/steal.js?yourapp). It then tracks all of the imports, JS, CSS, and EJS, and bundles them into either the production.js or the production.css. Note: the folks over at Bitovi been busily cooking up a new "packages" feature which I haven't yet had the chance to play around with, which promises to shrink the size of the monolithic production.js into more on-demand modules.



The generated scripts folder of a DoneJS app. Also note that there are a few other fun features in that folder besides building, which I can go over in greater detail in a future post.

Building with Maven (err, Ant)

So now back to the subject of this article: how does one integrate this cool build feature into their existing build system? I've got it working in a Maven build (albeit via an Ant task), since the server-side component of my application is Java.
   
    org.apache.maven.plugins
    maven-antrun-plugin
    1.7
    
     
      org.apache.ant
      ant-nodeps
      1.8.1
     
       
    
     
      build-donejs
      prepare-package
      
       
        
        
        
         
         
        
        
         
         
        
        
         
         
        
        
        
                  
              
              
        
         
          
          
          
         
         
          
         
        
        
        
        
            
                
            
        
       
       UTF-8
      
      
       run
      
     
    
   

Things to note in this setup:

  • I've split my web application into multiple distinct DoneJS apps; the line is drawn at the point where there's a distinct HTML page (in this case, login, app, and admin are separate pages).
  • I'm hosting my static content out of /src/main/resources/assets, which is sort of a convention when writing DropWizard applications (more on that awesome framework in a future post!)
  • I'm attaching this execution to the prepare-package build phase, since it takes a while (on the order of 5 minutes or more) and it's important to fail fast on the unit test phase. I've already moved all of the relevant resources into target during process-resources.
  • The production build can fail for a number of reasons, including syntax errors in your JS files, so it's important to look for the production.js files in your output directory and fail the build when they are missing. If you don't, there's a chance you will deploy a broken build to production and your users will not be terribly thrilled!

Not quite done yet!

There are two more steps to do in order to fully take advantage of this awesome build stuff.

First, you need to reference the production.css stylesheet in your html files. Do so like this (in your document's head, of course):

This will give you 404's while in development mode, and your app will flicker a bit in that mode since you're using StealJS to import your CSS files, but in production mode the production.css file will be present and everything will be blazingly fast.

Next, you need to tell StealJS to load your production.js file. I've done so in my Ant task by using regexreplace to replace the references to steal.js with steal.production.js.


  


So there you have it. Add this plugin definition to the build / plugins section of your pom, and run mvn clean package to generate the production files!

1 comment:

softmentor said...

Great Article! Is there a github source code link to download and try it out.