So over at Ajaxian today they have a post on Dean Edward’s latest update for his excellent packer javascript compression tool:

Dean Edwards has released Packer v3.0, one of the top utilities to squeeze your JavaScript like a lemon.

• respects Microsoft conditional comments
• new option to shrink variable and argument identifiers
• removed the special chars feature
  
  (except the ;;; feature which people seem to like)
• some bug fixes:
  • packer no longer closes spaces between the +/- operators so code like this is safe: c = a++ +b;
  • the throw”error”} bug that affected Safari (this is a Safari bug really but packer gets around it)
  • the __proto__ bug for Mozilla browsers (this only affected the online version of packer)
  • a minor parsing bug affecting the detection of regular expressions
• simplified the user interface

Update:

The problems I outline below are fixed. Thanks Dean!

Unfortunately, I ran one of our libraries through it and found two issues that we’ll need to address before we can use it (luckly, I have a local copy of the previous version of the Packer…):

• ‘http://…’ breaks. Your packer wants this to be double quotes (”http://…”).
• /*comment*//*followed by another comment*/ breaks. This happens in our code because we concatenate several files together and each file starts with comments and ends with comments.

I emailed Dean. Maybe he’ll have a fix. If not, we’ll have to figure something out or use the old one.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 8:12 am and is filed under CNET JS Standards, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.