Ajaxian

Monday, January 26th, 2009

RockstarApps’ Web Optimization plugins for Eclipse and Aptana

Category: Performance

<p>Bob Buffone has some interesting performance plugins for Eclipse and Aptana, so I asked him to tell us a little about them. He came up with this:

This week RockstarApps released a beta version of jsLex 1.2. The goal of project is to “codify” all the research that has been done in Web Optimization by people like Steve Souders and his 13+ Web Optimization Techniques, plus others. Making it possible for everyone to create highly optimized Web application with little or no impact on the how developers build and test their applications.

“If your Website is getting an “F” in YSlow! using the software you can change it into an “B” or better in a manner of minutes.” (Sounds like an infomercial, if you say it just right!) Check out rockstarapps.com itself – YSlow B(89). I have the print out hanging on my mom’s refrigerator. She’s very proud.

A complete listing of the features is located in the products section of the site. The tools give developers multiple ways to create optimized resources with Eclipse or Aptana. Simply select a set of files in the navigator view or a set of tags when editing an HTML file and the tools will take care of creating a concatenated, minified and GZipped version that can be deployed.

Existing Features

• Simple resource optimization workflow, Just point and Click.
• Eclipse builders to recreate optimized files when a depenency changes
• CSS optimization resolves internal @import statements and rewrites any ‘url()’ to be relative to the optimized CSS file.
• Creation of Sprites.
• CSS and JavaScript optimization uses YUI Compressor and GZipping

Features new to this release:

• Eclipse-based tools for managing Amazon WebServices; CloudFront, SimpleDB, S3, Simple Queue Service.
• Ant tasks for concatenating and compressing JavaScript and CSS.
• Improved Sprite Creation
• Improvements to Eclipse plugins for JavaScript and CSS Optimization.
• Complete Web application optimization and deployment wizard for Eclipse. This part is the coolest feature, instead of working at a resource level the tool will optimize an entire application.
• Eclipse-based Dojo Builder

The inclusion of the Amazon WS tools isn’t by accident or a side project (Not that you thought it would be). For developers looking to highly optimize their websites; the use of CDN’s like CloudFront or other can significantly improve the download speed of resources as well as allow developers to open up another connection to make page loading quicker. This has been demonstrated. The tools will take care of setting the headers correctly for the GZipped files, so even if Amazon doesn’t GZip on the fly, just uploading a static GZipped file will work correctly.

There are multiple videos of the software in action. The newest release is show cased, too.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 5:59 am
3 Comments