Minifier

What is this?

This project provides Java classes to do one thing: safely "minify" web resources. The key word is "safely": the aim is not to produce maximal size reduction, nor introduce any morphological changes, but to provide reasonable file size reduction in most cases.

At launch, we will provide classes to minify Javascript and CSS.

Getting started

There are two minifier classes:

• CSSMinifier for CSS; and
• JSMinifier for Javascript.

They both implement Minifier, which declares a single method:

void minify(Writer writer) throws MinificationException;

Further, they both extend AbstractMinifier, which provides a constructor taking a Reader object. So you need a Reader and a Writer to minify a resource, and that's it. For example:

Reader input = new FileReader("basic.css");
Writer output = new FileWriter("basic-min.css");
Minifier min = new CSSMinifier(input);
try {
    min.minify(output);
} catch (MinificationException e) {
    // Handle exception
}

And that's it. A MinificationException will usually wrap some other exception, such as CSSMinifier.UnterminatedCommentException. If you need to know why minification failed, you can call getCause() on the exception you catch.

Using Minifier

You can use Minifier in your projects by including it as a Maven dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>net.logicsquad</groupId>
  <artifactId>minifier</artifactId>
  <version>1.2</version>
</dependency>

If you're building a Maven project, and just want to minify project resources during the build, check out Minifier Maven Plugin, which uses Minifier to do the work.

Contributing

By all means, open issue tickets and pull requests if you have something to contribute.

References

Javascript minification is based on Douglas Crockford's original C-based JSMin, via a translation from C to Java by John Reilly. Code from these projects is used here under license.

CSS minification is based on the CSSMin project by Barry van Oudtshoorn. Code from this project is used here under license.