JSF HTML Whitespace, JS, and CSS Compression

This is the second approach to whitespace removal, JS, and CSS compression. In my article Whitespace Servlet Filter, I mentioned that I tried a number of approaches using htmlcompressor to accomplish this task.

This was my second approach which was to wrap the ResponseWriter in JSF to accomplish this task. The approach worked, but was abandoned before I finished writing some additional code to handle AJAX. This could be easily resolved with code that is similar to that found in Whitespace Servlet Filter.

This approach is very specific to JSF and relies on the project being pure JSF. The filter approach is more flexible in my judgement. I did think it was important to publish the code though on Github.

The code for the project can be found here: jsf-html-compressor.

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.

Embedded Tomcat 8.5

I was recently tasked with updating an embedded application that we use from Apache Tomcat 8.0.0 RC5. Yes, the project used a release candidate when it was created. I imagine it was like a number of projects where the project was being developed and the expectation was that Apache Tomcat 8.0 would be released and that they would update everything. Well that temporary solution became a permanent one. Years passed and finally a security audit brought to light that the application was out of date, and on further observation a release candidate was used.

I went back and looked at RC5, and subsequent versions including release notes. Release candidate 5 was very similar to Apache Tomcat 7. In fact, the same authentication was used. This changed in the actual 8.0 release where a new authentication mechanism was put into place. This change may have prevented those early adopters from updating the project since the authentication mechanism would have delayed the project since the internals would have needed a rewrite.

I was blessed with upgrading the project, but I also needed to look at using the latest stable version of Apache Tomcat 8.5.x. After trying out some of the new code I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to implement a very simple application in Apache Tomcat 8 embedded.

One of the items I really like is the ability to programmatically add various web objects like servlets to the container. It was slick and easy to accomplish. Think of it like a programmatic web.xml file.

The code for the sample project can be found on github at: tomcat-8-embedded