Jammit

Jammit is an industrial strength asset packaging library for Rails, providing both the CSS and JavaScript concatenation and compression that you'd expect, as well as ahead-of-time gzipping, built-in JavaScript template support, and optional Data-URI / MHTML image embedding.

Jammit is an open-source component of DocumentCloud.

Table of Contents

Installation | Configuration | Usage | Precaching Assets
Embedding Images | JavaScript Templates | Change Log

Links

Source Code | Internal Docs | Image Embedding Example

Jammit Diagram

Installation

  1. Grab the gem:
    gem install jammit --source http://gemcutter.org
  2. Add the gem to Rails' environment.rb inside of the initializer:
    config.gem "jammit"
  3. Edit config/routes.rb to give Jammit a route ( /assets by default) for dynamic asset packaging and caching: 

    ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  ...
  Jammit::Routes.draw(map)
  ...
end

Configuration

Jammit uses the config/assets.yml YAML configuration file to define packages and to set extra options. A package is an ordered set of directory glob rules that will be expanded into a unique list of files. An example of a complete assets.yml follows: 

embed_images: on

javascripts:
  workspace:
    - public/javascripts/vendor/jquery.js
    - public/javascripts/lib/*.js
    - public/javascripts/views/**/*.js

stylesheets:
  common:
    - public/stylesheets/reset.css
    - public/stylesheets/widgets/*.css
  workspace:
    - public/stylesheets/pages/workspace.css
  empty:
    - public/stylesheets/pages/empty.css

templates:
  everything:
    - app/views/jst/**/*.jst

There are a number of extra configuration options that you may add to the assets.yml configuration file to customize the way Jammit behaves:

package_assets on | off | always Defaults to on, packaging and caching assets in every environment but development. Never packages when off, always packages when always.
embed_images on | off | datauri Defaults to off. When on, packages and caches Data-URI and MTHML variants of your stylesheets, with whitelisted images embedded inline. Using datauri serves embedded images only to browsers that support Data-URIs, and serves unmodified stylesheets to Internet Explorer 7 or lower.
template_function on | off | ... The JavaScript function that compiles your JavaScript templates (JST). Defaults to on, which uses a bundled variant of Micro-Templating. Set it to _.template if you use Underscore.js, or new Template for Prototype. Turn it off to pass through the template strings unaltered.
package_path The URL at which packaged assets are cached and made available. Defaults to assets, but if you already have an existing AssetsController with a different purpose, you could change it to, say, packages.

Usage

To access your packages in views, use the corresponding helper. The helper methods can include multiple packages at once: 

<%= include_stylesheets :common, :workspace %>
<%= include_javascripts :workspace %>
<%= include_templates :everything %>

In development, no packaging is performed, so you'll see a list of individual references to all of the JavaScript and CSS files. The assets.yml configuration file is reloaded on every development request, so you can change the contents of your packages without needing to restart Rails.

In all other environments, or if package_assets is set to "always", you'll get tags for the merged packages. Both CSS and JavaScript are run through the excellent YUI Compressor.

Precaching Assets

Installing the Jammit gem provides the optional but handy jammit command-line utility, which can be hooked into your deployment process. The jammit command reads in your configuration file, generates all of the defined packages, and gzips them at the highest compression setting. In order to serve these static gzipped versions, configure your Nginx http_gzip_static_module, or your Apache Content Negotiation MultiViews. It's also a good idea to have gzip compression turned on for the remainder of your static assets, including any asset packages that aren't gzipped-in-advance. Adding Nginx's http_gzip_module or Apache's mod_deflate will do the trick.

The jammit command can be passed options to configure the path to assets.yml, and the output directory in which all packages are compiled. Run jammit --help to see all of the options.

Embedding Images

After you've finished concatenating and compressing your JavaScript and CSS files into streamlined downloads, the slowest part of your page load is probably the images. It's common to use image sprites to avoid the avalanche of HTTP requests that are needed to load a bunch of small images. Unfortunately, image sprites can be complicated to position (especially with horizontal and vertical tiling), and a real pain to create and maintain. With a little elbow grease from Jammit, your spriting woes can be a thing of the past.

With embed_images turned on, Jammit will inline image files directly into your compiled CSS, using Data-URIs in supported browsers, and MHTML in Internet Explorer 7 and below. Instead of ten CSS files referencing 30 images, you can have a single, packaged, minified, gzipped CSS file, with the images coming in all at once instead of piecemeal, making just a single HTTP request.

Take a look at this example (especially on a slow connection or wifi):
Normal Image Loading vs. Jammit Image Embedding

Embedded images can be a little tricky, which is why using them is strictly on an opt-in basis. After enabling embed_images in the configuration file, you'll need to whitelist the images that you'd like to make embeddable. When processing CSS, Jammit will only embed images that have .../embed/... somewhere in their path — the other images will be left untouched. You can make a single public/images/embed folder for your embedded images, or organize them into directories however you prefer. It's not recommended to embed all of your site's images, just the ones that conform to the following three rules:

  1. Images that are small. Large images will simply delay the rendering of your CSS. Jammit won't embed images larger than 32 kilobytes, because Internet Explorer 8 won't render them.
  2. Images that are immediately visible. It's better to leave the images that are hidden at page load time to download in the background.
  3. Images that are referenced by a single CSS rule. Referencing the same embedded image in multiple rules will cause that image's contents to be embedded more than once, defeating the purpose. Replace the duplicated rules with an image-specific HTML class, and you're good to go.

A final cautionary note. Internet Explorer's implementation of MHTML requires the use of absolute paths in image references. This means that the timestamp that Rails appends to the stylesheet URL (to allow far-future expires headers) needs to also be in the contents of the stylesheet. If a process on your webserver changes the modification time of the cached MHTML stylesheet, it will break the image references. To fix it, use the jammit command (with --base-url) to rebuild your assets, or simply delete the cached file, and let Jammit automatically rebuild the file on the next request.

If the MHTML stylesheets sound too fragile, or if you encounter any problems with them in Internet Explorer, you can set embed_images to "datauri". Using "datauri" will cause Internet Explorer 7 and below to receive plain versions of the packaged stylesheets, while all other browsers get the Data-URI flavor.

JavaScript Templates

If you're using enough JavaScript to want it compressed and concatenated, you're probably using it to generate at least a little of your HTML. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by joining together strings and inserting them into the DOM. A far more agreeable way to generate HTML on the client is to use JavaScript templates (JST). Think Rails views and ERB, but with interpolated JavaScript instead.

Jammit helps you keep your JavaScript views organized alongside your Rails views, bundling them together into packages, and providing them as functions for your client-side code to evaluate. By default, Jammit uses a variant of John Resig's Micro Templating to compile the templates, but you can use a JavaScript templating function of your choosing by specifying a template_function in assets.yml. Jammit will run all of your JST through the template function, and assign it by filename to a top-level JST object. For example, the following template, app/views/jst/license.jst: 

<div class="drivers-license">
  <h2>Name: <%= name %></h2>
  <em>Hometown: <%= birthplace %></em>
  <div class="biography">
    <%= bio %>
  </div>
</div>

Including the asset package makes this template available to your JavaScript as the JST.license function. 

JST.license({name : "Moe", birthplace : "Brooklyn", bio : "Moe was always..."});

To use Underscore.js templates, set template_function to "_.template".
To use Prototype templates, set it to "new Template".
To use Mustache.js templates, you'll need a little extra setup.

Change Log

0.1.3
Fixed a bug that conflicted with other plugins trying to alter ApplicationController in development.

0.1.1
Added support for embedding images with stylesheet-relative paths. Shortened the MHTML identifiers.

0.1.0
Initial Jammit release.


A DocumentCloud Project