Written by Martin Guppy on August 31, 2009 – 3:37 am
Two PHP libraries have been added to the Matter Distribution Network service and will be implemented for our customers to use from their web sites very soon.
Minification with Minify
Minify is a PHP5 app that can combine multiple CSS or Javascript files, compress their contents (i.e. removal of unnecessary whitespace/comments), and serve the results with HTTP encoding (gzip/deflate) and headers that allow optimal client-side caching.
Taken from the Minify Project Home page.
Bypassing Minify’s own techniques of caching and using their PHP classes directly will allow our customers to decide if they would like their static CSS/Javascript/HTML minified or not by simply appending the relevent query string command onto the end of their link URL (Javascript can also be packed using the PHP Version of the Dean Edwards ‘s Packer de Dean Edwards, a JavaScript Compressor/Obfuscater from our network at a later date).
The resulting output is cached on our network in the usual way and results in our customers providing their textual static content to end user browsers with a significantly smaller file size.
Graph Rendering with GraPHPite
GraPHPite is pronounced “graphite”, as in the layered hexagonal structure of carbon. It is an acronym of Graph and PHP and ‘ite to make it pronounceable.
Taken from the GraPHPite Project Home page.
Although GraPHPite seems to have halted development, the classes included within appear to provide us with an elegant object orientated method of creating statistical usage information in the form of graphs and bar charts for our customers to visually check their usage on our network.
We hope to go a few steps further utilising GraPHPite for our customers and can in theory allow the ability to create static graphs and bar charts for their web sites by simply appending a query string to the end of a link using a fictitious file name for static storage purposes.