Many days ago, in the JavaScript article tutorials about optimization for web performance, jsB@nk had also mentioned the importance of JavaScript files compression. You can still read them again:

- Performances of JavaScript Compressors
- JavaScript Performance Tips
- Speed Up JavaScript Performance with SharePoint Minifier
- Automatically Compressing JavaScript files on Apache

Today in this post, jsB@nk would like to provide you another JavaScript tutorial for optimizing JavaScript source codes/files with Google Closure. This is very detailed JavaScript article tutorial with full instructions and illustrative pictures. Please go to the inner page for it.

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One of the best practices to increase our site performance is to reduce the JavaScript file size and saving time for downloading it. On 5th of November 2009, Google has announced the release of Google Closure Compiler. So, what is that all about? In a nutshell, Closure Compiler is a tool that is used to rewrite our JS code to make it faster and more compact. In this post, I will go through with you, how can we build and compile our JS code with this optimizer on Windows platform.

To run the compiler on our machine, we need Java 6 or higher to be installed. If you have already had Java 6 or higher installed, just grab a Closure Compiler executable file. There are three ways for getting it:

1) The pre-built version - it can be found and downloaded at: http://code.google.com/p/closure-compiler/downloads/list

2) Check out the source and build it with Apache Ant

3) Check out the source and build it with Eclipse.

However, I will not explain into details for 2) and 3). I will use the pre-built version for compiling JS file instead. So, before we run the closure compiler, we need the executable file first. Just download the latest copy from this link. Once we have downloaded the compressed folder, extract all files and locate it in an empty folder, say 'work' folder. We should be able to see 3 files inside, as follows:

1) Say, I would like to compress 'facebox' jQuery plugin which is not compressed and the original file size is 10KB. What I want is to reduce its file size so that my site is not taking much time for first downloading the JS file. So, what I need to do is, copy the original JS file to the 'work' folder, like so:

2) Next, open the Windows' command line, and change the directory to the 'work' folder, as the screenshot shown at below:

3) Once we pressed 'Enter', this starts the compiler in interactive mode. The next thing we need to do is to type in 'var x = 17 + 25;' , just as follows:

4) Next, hit the 'Enter' key once we are done, and then hit the 'Ctrl-Z' keys and once again, hit the 'Enter' just after the 'Ctrl-Z'. The compiler will respond to us as 'var x=42;', as shown in this following srceenshot:

5) OK now, basically we are able to rewrite and compile our JS file at this stage. The optimizer tool has many options to read the input file and checking our code and so on. Such as, how to compile multiple JS files, etc. However, we will focus on one file in this tutorial. To compress and reduce 'facebox' plugin file, type in and run the following command:

java -jar compiler.jar --js facebox.js --js_output_file facebox-compiled.js

Please take note that, you are free to name the output of your JS file. In this case, I named it as 'facebox-compiled.js'.

6) Open the 'work' folder again after the command is executed, you should be able to see an additional file (facebox-compiled.js) inside the folder:

To learn more about Closure Compiler, please visit: http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/gettingstarted_app.html. Hope you enjoyed it.

Conclusion:
Google Closure Compiler is a powerful optimizer tool to analyze and rewritten our JS code. It will greatly reduce our file size as well. JS file size should always be concerned for the sake of the site performance.

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