Ajax Performance

Include, a new JS compression wrapper

Earlier this week, I talked about a tool which removes much of the tedium from generating CSS sprite maps. In a similar vein, Brian Moschel of the JavaScriptMVC Project pointed our good friends at Ajaxian to Include, a wrapper around Dean Edwards’ excellent JS compression tool, Packer.

Include is itself a fairly small chunk of JS which is designed to run within the browser of development and production users. This approach has some nice advantages: there’s no need for server side compression scripts and it’s easy to create many different compressed files depending on the different library requirements in different parts of your application. Expanding on that last point, you can select at browser load time which library to use within a specific page giving you runtime flexibility.

The one thing I don’t like is that Include is packaged as a separate .js file. As I’ve discussed here many times, performance in modern broadband networks is dominated by latency. The round trip time to request the initial include.js, which is only 3kB, will offset some of the gains from compressing and concatenating library files. In most use cases, the best performance approach will be to use include.js to compress your libraries only during development time, replacing all include.js references in production with a single compressed library call per page.