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Following the previous article Combine and minimize JavaScript and CSS files for faster loading, I implemented a similar solution as a Maven plugin.

This plugin combines and minimizes JavaScript and CSS files using YUI Compressor for faster page loading.

More details can be found on the Maven Minify Plugin page.

Reduce HTTP requests

On most sites, the major component of download time is not the base HTML file itself, but the number of subsequent HTTP requests to load the page’s supporting files - CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.
Each of those are extra HTTP requests, and each unique request takes a relatively long time.
The fewer requests to the server that the browser has to make, the faster the page will load.
There is an inherent overhead in each HTTP request. It takes substantially less time to serve one 60K file than it does three 20K files and a lot less than it does six 10K files.

Combine and minimize files

This post will explain how to combine and minimize CSS and JavaScript files using YUI Compressor and Ant.

This can be done by just concatenating all files into two combined files (one for CSS and one for JavaScript) and minimize them. You can quickly go from 10 or more files down to 2, and their size can be greatly reduced.

To keep the modularity that comes with splitting these files out by section (or business unit), keep them split in your development process, and combine them in your build process. A first Ant task will combine them and a second task will generate their minimized versions.

This technique has been successfully used in libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Dojo, ExtJS, YUI, etc, allowing developers to better organize their code.
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“.htaccess - gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving” is one of the most popular posts on samaxes.
It’s basically on how to compress and cache your site content with Apache and .htaccess file.

It works like a charm, but it’s not yet the perfect configuration for me.
I wanted something that I can use out-of-the-box without having to rely on external extension modules or tools.

If you are lucky enough to have Apache 2 with your hosting provider you can use the mod_deflate module that comes bundled with it.

In order to compress your text files with this Apache’s module you just have to add the following lines to your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
  <FilesMatch "\.(css|js|x?html?|php)$">
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  </FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

This will gzip all your *.css, *.js, *.html, *.html, *.xhtml, and *.php files.
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Last week I changed my hosting provider from Site5 to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
Despite the fact that the first one is faster than the second, NFSN is a lot more cheaper (I only pay what I really use).

So in order to speed up my site and save bandwidth (the more I use the more I pay) I use .htaccess file to gzip my text based files and optimize cache HTTP headers.
Although this site is powered by Wordpress which has some really great plugins to optimize PHP output I wanted a more generic solution which can be applied to all PHP web applications.

I also try to follow as much as I can the rules for high performance web sites so don’t be surprised if some Expires header seems too long (far future Expires header rule requires at least 172801 seconds).
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