With our so-called "Web 2.0" applications and their rich content and interaction, we expect our applications to increasingly make use of CSS and JavaScript. To make sure these applications are nice and snappy to use, we need to optimize the size and nature of content required to render the page, making sure we’re delivering the optimum experience. In practice, this means a combination of making our content as small and fast to download as possible, while avoiding unnecessarily refetching unmodified resources.
This is complicated a little by the nature of CSS and JavaScript resources. In contrast to image assets, CSS and JavaScript source code is very likely to change many times as time goes by. When these resources change, we need our clients to download them all over again, invalidating the version in their local cache (and any versions stored in other caches along the way). In this article, we’ll look at ways we can make the whole experience as fast as possible for our users - the initial page load, subsequent page loads and ongoing resource loading as the application evolves and content changes.
I believe strongly in making things as simple as possible for developers, so we’ll also be looking at ways we can set up our systems to automatically take care of these optimization issues for us. With a little up front work, we can get the best of both worlds - an environment that makes development easy with great end-user performance - all without changing the way we work.
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