FEATURE: 2013.3 Asset Optimization Engine - JavaScript And Stylesheet Combination And Minification.

Technically a feature for the new admin. Will impact page load performance by reducing the amount of content requests and the size of those requests. The combination process takes separate assets and merges them into one file. Minification removes comments and unnecessary whitespace, as well as shortening local variable names.

Devs: Assets are version-specific. The build process will assemble the assets for production (it will not process them on-the-fly in production at this time). There are options for on-the-fly combination and minification if we want to use the feature in the development environment. We can expand on these options later. Note that using the minifier in the on-the-fly configuration makes slight impact in page load performance, but only when there are asset changes to process. Combiner performance is pretty solid. The minifier will not run without the combiner. On-the-fly configuration for dev will detect changes to the asset definition file and to the source files used to build the asset and will refresh the asset accordingly.

Configuration Preferably a fresh directory will be used for these. I have already made one for the admin. For on-the-fly, it will write to this directory, which is why this is only available for dev. For production the precompiled assets will also be placed in this directory.