Recently, I’ve been playing around with Minify. For those who’ve never heard of it, Minify is a simple HTTP content server built as a PHP5 application. It’s placed in a folder on your server, and then either using a querystring or mod_rewrite, it will dynamically merge and minify CSS and JS files as they are served up to a user’s browser. This allows you to develop using multiple CSS or JS files with comments and clear visual formatting, but when they are delivered to your users via a browser, they get minified and optionally merged making your site load and render faster in the user’s browser.
While Minify is meant to run on a webserver, I thought it could also work as a handy offline tool for optimizing Nokia WRT widgets. Since WRT widgets are just zipped folders of Javascript, HTML and CSS, Minify seems like a simple step you could include in the widget packaging process of your workflow before testing and deploying.
I wasn’t sure how much savings Minify would give the average WRT widget, so as a quick test I batch processed the contents of the STEW sample widget from Forum Nokia using Minify running on a local webserver. The resulting files were bundled as a new widget, and here’s a comparison of the two.
| Size of all Files | WGZ size | |
|---|---|---|
| Forum Nokia version | 122.4K | 83.0K |
| Minified version | 106.3K | 78.2K |
| Difference | 13.2% smaller | 5.8% smaller |
The savings aren’t gigantic, but they’re significant enough that you should seriously consider adding this step before deploying a widget. I’d also be curious to see if anyone has done comparisons about whether or not Minify affects how much memory is consumed at run-time in the browser.
I might do some more work on automating this process or creating a tool that minifies widgets automatically for you, but ideally, I think this should be something automatically built into widget IDEs like Aptana.
How are other developers out there currently optimizing their widgets for release on Ovi Store?
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Tomislav |
Hi,
I am trying to find a tool for minifying JS to reduce size of WRT widgets. I am not sure but I think it should reduce memory consumption. I guess all the JS files are loaded to the memory of the phone when you start WRT app. If you minify then then you will redoce the size of JS files because you will drop comments and extra spaces. This should drop the memory consumption.
Although I haven’t tested this