D3 has a ton of source code, but when they release they only release one long JavaScript file. How do they get all of the source into that JavaScript file? Is there a standard way to do this?
Asked
Active
Viewed 495 times
0
-
These tools are called "JavaScript minifiers". They are often included in the source repository, just have a look at them. – ComFreek Oct 23 '13 at 16:27
3 Answers
2
d3 is open source, so you can see exactly how it is done.
In this case, they use a Makefile using the smash node package to concatenate the files. Appears to be a custom solution (given that the author of this module is the primary developer of d3)
Others use different techniques. I prefer writing small scripts and simply concatenating them together
SheetJS
- 22,470
- 12
- 65
- 75
1
There are a number of tools that you can use to compress and obfuscate Javascript code. One of the best tools is Google's Closure Compiler. With such tools your code generally has abide by certain conventions in order to be compiled correctly and without introducing new errors. Closure provide the Linter tool to check your syntax and recommend changes. The Closure compiler is a command line tool, so you could concatenate your files and pipe them to the compiler for compression as described here: Compress all file .js with Google Closure Compiler Application in one File
Other tools are available as well, such as Require.JS which provides an JS optimizer that can compress your code as well as provide a number of other features like asynchronous loading.
0
What is becoming the standard way of doing this is to use Grunt and the Grunt concat plugin.
Grunt: http://gruntjs.com/ Grunt concat plugin: https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-concat
Note: D3 is using a Makefile, might be historical, but Grunt is a simpler option in my opinion.
sMoZely
- 369
- 1
- 10