Asset Fingerprinting

These are just some notes on asset fingerprinting, which will replace the current mechanism of asset versioning.

on server:

• deployment process adds fingerprints (md5 hash of file content) to asset filenames
• bootup process creates creates map of asset paths to fingerprints
• asset helpers automatically insert fingerprint into asset paths
• when rendering views are parsed to extract referenced assets. fingerprints for those assets are returned as html bundle metadata.
• asset fingerprint map for a view can be cached if set of referenced assets is static
  • initially driven by configuration hints about what views can or cannot have asset fingerprint maps cached
  • theoretically possible to determine this automatically with parse tree of template

on client:

• template asset helpers and JS asset methods insert fingerprints returned in html bundle into asset paths