Minification (programming)

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Minification (very often just minify, and sometimes also minimisation or minimization), in computer programming languages and especially JavaScript, is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code, without changing its functionality. These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments and sometimes block delimiters; which are used to add readability to the code, but are not required for it to execute.

Minified source code is specially useful for interpreted languages deployed and transmitted on the Internet (such as JavaScript), because it reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Minified source code may also be used as a kind of obfuscation. In Perl culture, aiming at extremely minified source code is the purpose of Perl golf game.

Minified source code is also very useful for HTML code. All white space in HTML is reduced to only one space on the surface of a web page, so it's often quite possible to halve the size of a web page, by removing all excessive white space.

[edit] See also

• Copy protection
• Reverse engineering
• Obfuscated code

[edit] External links

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JavaScript Minifiers

• JSMin - A reputed tool
• Packer by Dean Edwards - efficient, preserves conditional comments and can optionally Base62 compress (with decompression JS inserted) and shrink variable names (to single letters).

Multi-purpose

• pack:tag - A JSP Taglib for minifying JavaScript and CSS on the fly (with caching, combination and compressing (gzip)) (Official Documentation).
• JSO - JavaScript Optimizer allows easy management of JavaScript and CSS resources and to reduce the amount of data transferred between the server and the client.
• Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor - Compress JavaScript and CSS using this Java application from the Yahoo! team.

Web Development

• JAWR - A library for Java web applications that joins javascript files and then minifies and compresses them, fostering a modular approach to development. Its main benefit is that developers can switch from the joined, compressed form to separate and uncompressed versions of the scripts, whithout the need to change the pages.
• Minify - A PHP library that combines, minifies, and caches JavaScript and CSS files on the fly.
• JS Dojo Minifier