Web server that serves multiple JavaScript libraries in a single http request. During web development, a project will need the use of different kind of libraries. It can be frameworks, plugins or tracking scripts. Some websites load these dependencies one http request at a time. This means that, as dependencies grows, it creates an overhead on the performance of the website. To handle this, there are some continuous integration tools for unifying and minifying files. But, theses tools take time and knowledge to make proper use of them. Hopefully MixerJS will provide a easy solution.
The basic use will be:
To run mixerJS, you will need to install nodejs. Go to their website for further instructions. Once installed, you can run the following command in the terminal:
npm install
npm start
Mixerjs uses bower for fetching the necessary libraries and does some underneath logic to handle library dependency and errors. It uses different tools for minifying, concatenating and making custom builds.
MixerJs will have by default some basic configuration.
config.json
{
"env" : "develop",
"port" : 8080
}Minifying the libraries can be optional. Adding .min.js to the end of the filename will minify it automatically.
For better use of MixerJS, we can take advantage of nginx cache. Nginx cache is very fast, with either memcache or disk storage. The first attempt to retrieve the file will go through nginx and it will be proxied to mixerJS. Subsequent attempts will be serve by nginx's cache.
Some libraries doesn't follow the correct pattern when setting up their bower.json, as a consequence, mixerjs has
problems to find the corresponding library file. libraryFallback.json is a json file that solves this issue,
setting the correct bower properties for each library.
{
"jquery-easing-original": {
"default": {
"main":"jquery.easing.js"
},
"1.3.2": {
"main":"jquery.easing.js"
}
}
}MixerJS have some test you can run by using mocha. To run the tests with mocha installed go to the terminal and do:
npm test
We have set up a small server using the domain name mixerjs.com, so you can check it online. Some uses are:
JS