{"id":2360,"date":"2021-06-19T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-19T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chewett.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2360"},"modified":"2021-06-18T20:06:11","modified_gmt":"2021-06-18T19:06:11","slug":"learning-points-from-writing-my-own-js-css-caching-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chewett.co.uk\/blog\/2360\/learning-points-from-writing-my-own-js-css-caching-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning points from writing my own JS\/CSS caching system"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This post talks about the various points I have learned from writing my own caching system, Cache-N-Crunch<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Why write your own caching system?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A while ago I wanted to minify the JavaScript and CSS on a website I worked on. The obvious solution would be to use one of the many caching libraries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to take advantage of merging all the files together and delivering a minified asset set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However there was one problem, the second developer didn’t want to use anything that wouldn’t automatically flush the cache. They typically devved directly on the main server as it was their testing server. This meant they required it to be simple to update as they were testing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the caching layers I looked at require a cache clear. This was a manual step which created production ready assets. This wouldn’t be acceptable to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of them were able to turn on development mode. In this mode it would continually regenerate the assets to use during development. But again running a command so they could work was not acceptable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So eventually I decided that I would learn the intricacies of caching and write one myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compressing the assets<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I wrote two small PHP wrappers around UglifyCSS and UglifyJS which allowed my caching library to minify the data. This simplified the logic to purely determining whether the caching needed to be invalidated and regenerated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This also benefitted from a pretty thorough compression program that was already used by many thousands of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fulfilling the requirement of automatic compression<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The primary requirement was that if a file has changed, it needs to be automatically compressed and minified for production. It also needs to be immediately reflected when devving. To achieve this I had two sets of logic, one for development and one for production use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Logic for production mode<\/h3>\n\n\n\n