Wednesday, November 20, 2013

JavaScript: Minification and Compression

After JavaScript is baked it is time to think about fastest delivery of your fresh tasty product. You might think about how to shrink your source to minimize download time. There are couple ways to achieve this goal by using minification and compression. Don't think about them as the different names for the same process they are different and can be combined to get better result.

Minification is the process of eliminating unnecessary characters from java script that doesn't affect functionality like white-spaces, comments and shorten the names of script objects. The resulting file stays in the same text format and can be opened and read by regular text editor.

Compression is the process of shrinking JavaScript text even further using special compression algorithm. Resulting file is not readable and must be decompressed to be used. Modern browsers understands files received with header 'Content-Encoding: gzip' and decompress them by default.

To get best results files with JavaScript could be minified and then compressed.

There are several popular minifiers out there:

  • YUI Compressor
  • Cosure Compiles
  • UglifyJS
It is definitely worth to automate minification process and do it during the packaging of your application. Whatever you use in your build and CI there is always some sort of build extensions that can do it for you.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

EclipseCon 2010 API Design and Evolution (Tutorial)

EclipseCon 2010 API Design and Evolution (Tutorial):

In Open Source Development anyone doing something for public consumption should be aware it is not just his personal possession anymore and there are developers out there using it in every day work. Thus this API Design and Evolution practices should be the part of every day work.

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Monday, July 1, 2013

MouseFeed for Eclipse is Your Personal Keyboard Shortcuts Coach

MouseFeed | Eclipse Plugins, Bundles and Products - Eclipse Marketplace: "MouseFeed helps to form a habit of using keyboard shortcuts. When the user clicks on a button or on a menu item, the plugin shows a popup reminding about the key shortcut. After a few times, you remember the keyboard shortcut and you will start using it, rather than clicking through menus. This will save you a lot of time at the end of the day."

It works as advertised and started to show popups for actions selected trough menu right after installation and restart. For example, if  "Run->Run..." menu action selected popup shown below appear.

MouseFeed Plug-in Popup Window look

It also has "Action invocation counter threshold" parameter in preferences, which controls the popup behavior for actions without shortcuts.

MouseFeed Plug-in Preferences

If for example "Help->About Eclipse Platform" menu Item selected 3 times, then this plugin shows popup with link to configure shortcut for it.

MouseFeed Plug-in Popup window look for action without shortcut

For more information look at:




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