Combres 2.0 - A Library for ASP.NET Website Optimization

A few months ago, I released the beta version of Combres 1.0, a .NET library that automates the application of many web performance optimization techniques for ASP.NET applications. I also wrote an article about that release to demonstrate the features of the library. Since that article was published, there have been a couple of minor releases until last week when a major release, version 2.0, was out. There are many changes in version 2.0 that it wouldn't make sense to update the old article, so I decide to write this article to introduce readers about Combres 2.0. This is supposed to be a self-contained article, so you don't need to refer to the old article to understand about Combres.  
Combres in a Nutshell

The development of Combres was inspired by the simple, yet highly effective, website optimization techniques described in a book by Steve Sounders and the documentation of the FireFox's addon YSlow. Specifically, Combres automates the application of the following website optimization techniques in your ASP.NET MVC or ASP.NET Web Forms applications while requiring you to do very little work.  

   * Make fewer HTTP requests. Using Combres, your describe your website's resources, including JavaScript and CSS files, in an XML config file and group them into different resource sets. Combres will combine resources in the same resource set and make the combined content available in 1 single HTTP request.
   * Add Expires or Cache-Control header. Combres automatically emits Expires and Cache-Control response headers in responding to the HTTP request for each resource set based on the caching information you specify in the XML config file. In addition, Combres caches the combined content on the server so that the combination process, among other steps described below, won't be executed for every new user (or when an existing user's browser cache is invalidated).
   * Gzip components. Combres will detect Gzip and/or Deflate support in the users' browser and apply the appropriate compression algorithm on each resource set's combined content before sending it to the browser. If the browser doesn't support compression, Combres will return the raw output instead.
   * Minify JavaScript. Combres can minify the contents of both JavaScript and CSS resources. For JavaScript resources, you can configure Combres to choose among the following minification engines: YUI Compressor for .NET, Microsoft Ajax Minifier and Google Closure Compiler. For each of these engines, Combres allows you to configure all specific attributes so that you can maximize its effectiveness. Each resource set is usually assigned with a specific minification engine although if you need to, you can have resources within the same resource set minified using separate minification engines.
   * Configure ETags. Combres emits ETags for each resource set's combined content. When the browser sends back an ETag, Combres will check to see if that ETag identifying the latest version of the resource set or not, if not it will push the new content to the browser; otherwise, it will return a Not Modified (304) response status.  

In short, Combres helps combine, minify, compress, append appropriate headers and cache JavaScript and CSS resources in your application. All you need to do are creating an XML config file describing what you want Combres to do and adding a few lines of code to register and use Combres in your applications. In this article, we'll explore these core features as well as more advanced features of Combres.

Read more: Codeproject

Posted via email from jasper22's posterous