Packing, caching, JS and CSS in PHP that differentiate between development and production environment

Question

I am trying to make development easy and have highly optimized output in production.

The goals of what I am trying to do is:

Answer 1

Still working on exploring the best solution leveraging the resource already available.

CSS-JS-Booster and Turbine so far looks like the best starting point: http://github.com/Schepp/CSS-JS-Booster and http://turbinecss.org/

Other JS/CSS Combiners solutions and articles

• http://code.google.com/p/minify is good but seem a little to hard to configure.
• http://rakaz.nl/code/combine Let you use sintax like this: http://www.creatype.nl/javascript/prototype.js,builder.js,effects.js,dragdrop.js,slider.js (not exactly the best) I also think I saw a patch to this script but I cannot find it now. (example of usage http://brainfart.com.ua/post/code-cache-combine/)
• http://www.ejeliot.com/blog/72 and http://www.ejeliot.com/samples/combine/combine.phps Ed Eliot combine.php solution. It only let you have specify once the file to merge
• http://aciddrop.com/php-speedy/ other solution.
• http://www.artzstudio.com/2008/08/using-modconcat-to-speed-up-render-start/ Use of mod_concat and overview of other solutions
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ That is a WordPress Plugin. It is very interesting but probably to much work to make it independendt from Wordpress.
• http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/combine-your-js-css-files-for-faster-loading CakePHP solution

Resource for JS compression and caching:

• http://code.google.com/p/php-closure/ PHP script that let you combine .js files ancd combile thought the Google Closure REST API. Check timestamps and cache the combined version locally.
• http://dean.edwards.name/download JS packer compressor/obfuscator. I am not sure how long the decompression take. But it was able to shrink the jQuery 1.4.2 compiled/minified with Closure to 50639 bytes from 71946 (almost 30% reduction!) with Base62 Encode on! It would be interesting to compare the gzipped versions. Regarding JS obfuscation Packer optimizer make a little more difficult to tamper in your JS code.
• http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/serving-javascript-fast/ Great discussion about gzip and caching
• http://cjohansen.no/en/ruby/juicer_a_css_and_javascript_packaging_tool Ruby Juicer JS/CSS packaging tool

LESS compilers/tutorials/tools:

• http://designshack.co.uk/articles/css/using-less-js-to-simplify-your-css3 Less.js tutorial/introduction.
• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/quick-tip-you-need-to-check-out-less-js Presentation of less.js (useful comments)
• http://fadeyev.net/2010/06/19/lessjs-will-obsolete-css/ and http://github.com/cloudhead/less.js It is a LESS compiler written in JS and can also be added in the browser. Great for development
• http://lesscss.org/ What LESS is. Originally written in Ruby but there are implementation in a lot of different fanguages,
• http://leafo.net/lessphp/ Less compiler written in PHP (it does not seem updated)
• 960 is another way to make it things easier; http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/03/fight-div-itis-and-class-itis-with-the-960-grid-system/
• http://github.com/everzet/sfLESSPlugin LESS in symphony
• http://drupal.org/project/less Drupal CSS Preprocessor
• http://github.com/sunny/csscaffold A PHP parser of something similar to LESS but not quite
• http://code.google.com/p/maven-less-plugin/ maven-less-plugin uses rhino, envjs and less.js to translate the less-code to css during the process-source phase of your maven build. In the end you get a artifact with ready-to-use css code.

At Deployment time options:

• http://phing.info/docs/guide/stable/ Phing is build/deployment system in PHP
• http://www.capify.org/index.php/Capistrano The Ruby solution