Sling Web Resource Optimizers

[Bob Paulin <bo...@bobpaulin.com>]

CQ provides several features for consolidating and minifying CSS and 
JavaScript.  However a number of technologies such as CoffeeScript, 
Handlebars, and LESS have emerged help developers in various ways with 
front end development.  Sling supports numerous server side scripting 
languages for working with JCR but I'm curious if Sling might ever be 
intended to support front end scripting languages. Projects such as 
wro4j (http://alexo.github.com/wro4j) support these things but don't 
have the convenience of the JCR to store compiled resources.

I started playing around with CoffeeScript and it seems like these 
things could be useful to bake in.  If not in Sling in CQ. Thoughts?

https://github.com/bobpaulin/sling-coffee

- Bob Paulin
http://bobpaulin.com
@bobpaulin

Re: Sling Web Resource Optimizers

[Bob Paulin <bo...@bobpaulin.com>]

Thanks for the suggestions Bertrand/Lucas.  I like the idea of 
decoupling the cache from the compiler implementation.  I've abstracted 
out the cache and compiler interface to make it plugable to other web 
resource types.  Also beefed up the CoffeeScript unit tests.  I've 
created a JIRA to track any additional community feedback: 
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SLING-2805.

- Bob


On 3/26/2013 4:54 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
> Hi Bob,
>
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 5:03 AM, Bob Paulin <bo...@bobpaulin.com> wrote:
>> ...Sling supports numerous server side scripting languages
>> for working with JCR but I'm curious if Sling might ever be intended to
>> support front end scripting languages. Projects such as wro4j
>> (http://alexo.github.com/wro4j) support these things but don't have the
>> convenience of the JCR to store compiled resources....
> I like the idea, and your CoffeeScript example demonstrates it very nicely.
>
> Having such tings in our /contrib source code folder would be great
> IMO, as long as each module has meaningful automated tests they should
> be easy to maintain.
>
> There's a set of common logic and requirements for this server-side
> compiling of client-side code, at least on the caching side, and that
> can probably be generalized.
>
> -Bertrand
>

Re: Sling Web Resource Optimizers

[Bertrand Delacretaz <bd...@apache.org>]

Hi Bob,

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 5:03 AM, Bob Paulin <bo...@bobpaulin.com> wrote:
> ...Sling supports numerous server side scripting languages
> for working with JCR but I'm curious if Sling might ever be intended to
> support front end scripting languages. Projects such as wro4j
> (http://alexo.github.com/wro4j) support these things but don't have the
> convenience of the JCR to store compiled resources....

I like the idea, and your CoffeeScript example demonstrates it very nicely.

Having such tings in our /contrib source code folder would be great
IMO, as long as each module has meaningful automated tests they should
be easy to maintain.

There's a set of common logic and requirements for this server-side
compiling of client-side code, at least on the caching side, and that
can probably be generalized.

-Bertrand

Re: Sling Web Resource Optimizers

[Bertrand Delacretaz <bd...@apache.org>]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 6:46 AM, Lukas Eder <lu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...maybe, Sling could host
> popular third-party contributions...

Definitely - we already have /contrib for that.

For me an important criterion for accepting such contributions is
their sustainability. Code that's well tested and easy to understand
helps, and we're certainly open to voting in authors of such code in
as committers, even if we don't expect them to hack in the core too
much initially.

-Bertrand

Re: Sling Web Resource Optimizers

[Lukas Eder <lu...@gmail.com>]

I've had similar thoughts, recently. Specifically for the case of
LESS, I was thinking that adding a "plugin" to Sling, which takes care
of storing and compiling and caching results of LESS resources in the
repository would be very useful. Of course, this wouldn't have to be
maintained by Sling as a core module. But maybe, Sling could host
popular third-party contributions.

2013/3/26 Bob Paulin <bo...@bobpaulin.com>:
>
>
> CQ provides several features for consolidating and minifying CSS and
> JavaScript.  However a number of technologies such as CoffeeScript,
> Handlebars, and LESS have emerged help developers in various ways with front
> end development.  Sling supports numerous server side scripting languages
> for working with JCR but I'm curious if Sling might ever be intended to
> support front end scripting languages. Projects such as wro4j
> (http://alexo.github.com/wro4j) support these things but don't have the
> convenience of the JCR to store compiled resources.
>
> I started playing around with CoffeeScript and it seems like these things
> could be useful to bake in.  If not in Sling in CQ. Thoughts?
>
> https://github.com/bobpaulin/sling-coffee
>
> - Bob Paulin
> http://bobpaulin.com
> @bobpaulin
>
>