Topic: TrickyScripter

Almost everyone can add scripts to site to make it cool an usable. With AJAX technology we can bring sites to new level of usability.
But...
1) Additional script means additional traffic - sometimes it matters.
AJAX scripts and WYSIWYG editors can be really big (hundreds of kilobytes)
2) Why you have to share your script with all?
You spend time and money to develop script, but now everyone can get it for free from your site.

Yes, there is tons of optimizers, obfuscators, crunchers, compressors and other stuff to make scripts small and incomprehensible.
But all that tools I've seen have some imperfections.
The most widespread and annoying problem is following: not all scripts can run after obfuscating and compression!
Some tools can only delete spaces and tabs (sometimes comments) from source. It is very fast and easy, but effect is not really big.
Some obfuscators and compressors are expensive.

Everybody have a right to make scripts small and to not share his work with everyone.
Me and everyone want to have perfect tool for no money.
With this thoughts I started new project - TrickyScripter.
TrickyScripter supposed to be ultimate tool for web developer. It is next generation script optimizer (it is like Zend Optimizer for JavaScript).
It can be used both online and offline with any JavaScript-enabled browser.
TrickyScripter is free and opensource (avalible at http://ecoder.org.ua/tricky.htm)
In current version TrickyScripter can safely rearrange your code to make it smaller and faster:
- delete unneeded code and markup
- replace local variables names with shorter ones
- replace some long commands with shorter equal ones
- compact variables declarations
Also it can visualize code structure to help you refactor code, solve problems in scripts and understand third party scripts.
It is smart and will not use some techniques when optimizing functions containing "eval()" and other similar commands.
With TrickyScripter you can optimize whole script or only some functions as well.
Usually it can reduce script size by 50% and more. Smaller script can be downloaded and even executed faster (and you can save on your traffic!).
Fast site is better then slow site, isn't it?

Many cool features will be added in next version of TrickyScripter.
Want to try it? Welcome to http://ecoder.org.ua/tricky.htm !
Want to be beta tester and use new features earlier than others? Send request to scriptGuru@gmail.com
Join us!

Val Polyakh
developer, project manager
scriptGuru@gmail.com

Spam? I'm a little reluctant ot make the call on this one, but what the hell. If I call it wrong, it can always be moved back.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

/me misses the spammers that could actually speak English

Why don't you make a REAL compression algorithm instead of simply obfuscating the code ? Using simple LZwhatever you can compress your compr... hum, obfuscated code by a factor of 1:2 and more.

poi, sure it can't compress your 256b and other cool things
But nobody needs another LZ thing (HTTP1.1 already uses gzip/compress/deflate).
In some cases it is very handy to make script smaller (and then protocol's built in compression will make it even smaller). REAL compressors like my eCoder and Packer by Dean Edwards really compresses the code but need time for decompression and affects HTTP built in compression.

BTW now it is much better and it is extension for Dreamweaver.
There is fully functional trial version with unlimited trial period.
the new address is http://trickyscripter.com

LZ techniques have an interrest when working with a strong client side size constraint, such as in 256b.htm , the5k or some demo competitions but I admit that's a marginal use case.

I think some version of PPM is the best choice for scripts compression (and also for any texts).
But it is too slow for JS client side decompression. It is interestiong for experiments but not for practical use with JS. LZ techniques are fast at all but still too slow for JS implementation. Also there is no algorithms that can be normally used with JS on client side - because they all produce binary data. When converting from binary to BASE64 we loosing the sence of compression because this convertation usually compensate the compression.
When I was thinking about script's size reduction the first thing I though was compression. And I made lots of experiments on that field.
What is the most effective way to compress images? Lossy algorithms. DCT, wavelets.
My tool implements lossy compression for scripts - the local vars and functions names are lost after optimization. All markup are lost. The size is reduced by 2-3 times. But the browser can't see the difference.
The decompression si not needed at all. I believe this is the best way to compress scripts - compression without compresson. If we need the better ratios then we can compress optimized code with any algorithm - and it is more effective then trying to compres not prepared code.

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