Whitespace Servlet Filter

A few years ago I worked on a number of different techniques to strip the whitespace out of web pages. My goal was to come up with a solution for JSF pages. I tried a number of different solutions,  but they were all based on a framework called htmlcompressor which is a now abandoned project in the archives of Google Code. This framework used the Google Closure Compiler to handle the heavy lifting.

This solution worked flawlessly when we tested it on JSF pages, but there was a push to use pre-minified pages for static content, and leave JSF pages alone. I abandoned this project until I was using Google PageSpeed to check the speed of some pages to enhance their performance.  I remembered this approach I tried back in 2011, and tried it again with great success and only minor tweaking. I have decided to publish the code on Github.

The project can be found here: whitespace-filter.