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The new version (1.7.3) of Minify Maven Plugin has just been released. The list of enhancements include: Support for JavaScript Source Maps Better docs Update to the last version of Google Closure Compiler Add support for Google Closure Compiler angular_pass option to support AngularJS @ngInject annotations Get it while it’s still hot!…

I’ve recently implemented some new improvements to Minify Maven Plugin. Version 1.6 added support for Google Closure Compiler and version 1.7 offers several performance improvements and more detailed logs (e.g. compression benefits from minification). A complete list of changes can be found in the changelog file. For next releases I’m planning to add Source Maps support and improve the documentation.…

My previous Maven 2 Cobertura Plugin article gives a workaround for the very buggy version 2.1 of the Cobertura Maven Plugin.

This bug is fixed on versions 2.2 or higher, and consequently, that workaround does not work anymore.

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Following the previous article Combine and minimize JavaScript and CSS files for faster loading, I implemented a similar solution as a Maven plugin. This plugin combines and minimizes JavaScript and CSS files using YUI Compressor for faster page loading. More details can be found on the Minify Maven Plugin page.…

Reduce HTTP requests

On most sites, the major component of download time is not the base HTML file itself, but the number of subsequent HTTP requests to load the page’s supporting files - CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.

Each of those are extra HTTP requests, and each unique request takes a relatively long time. The fewer requests to the server that the browser has to make, the faster the page will load.

There is an inherent overhead in each HTTP request. It takes substantially less time to serve one 60K file than it does three 20K files and a lot less than it does six 10K files.

Combine and minimize files

This post will explain how to combine and minimize CSS and JavaScript files using YUI Compressor and Ant.

This can be done by just concatenating all files into two combined files (one for CSS and one for JavaScript) and minimize them. You can quickly go from 10 or more files down to 2, and their size can be greatly reduced.

To keep the modularity that comes with splitting these files out by section (or business unit), keep them split in your development process, and combine them in your build process. A first Ant task will combine them and a second task will generate their minimized versions.

This technique has been successfully used in libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Dojo, ExtJS, YUI, etc, allowing developers to better organize their code.

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The Maven 2 Cobertura Plugin web site lacks information to successfully generate Cobertura reports. Worse, some of the usage examples are incorrect and don’t work. The most common problem when generating Cobertura reports is when the generated report shows 100% test coverage while in reality many of the classes don’t even have tests. The following example shows how to configure the reports so that it would reflect real test coverage and then check if the specified packages achieved the wanted test coverage:…

Problem - You want to use the last Hibernate 3 (Object to Relational Mapping Solution) with a code generation tool that automatically generates your Hibernate descriptor files, and build your project with an advanced build tool like Maven2.

Solution - Use maven2-xdoclet2-plugin.

Maven is a popular open source build tool for enterprise Java projects; it can manage a project’s build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information (POM file).

XDoclet is an open source code generation engine with the goal of continuous integration. It enables Attribute-Oriented Programming for java. It uses custom JavaDoc-like tags to generate external resource files to support the main Java classes. XDoclet has mainly been used for the auto-generation of EJB descriptors (and related J2EE container technologies). XDoclet2 is a rewrite of the XDoclet engine. It allows you to use Hibernate 3 features, Java5 language features in your model POJOs, and has substantially better error reporting than XDoclet.

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