WankenBerry is a PHP script I wrote to minify and concatenate JavaScript and CSS files on the fly. This way you can work on several small files that are formatted nicely and have the server optimize them for you. When you hit the server with your browser it checks for the cache file and if it isn’t there it recompiles it from your source files. This allows you to test your files the same way they are going to be deployed, but you still get all the benefits of reducing transfer size and the the number of network calls.
WankenBerry was inspired by a talk I saw a while back by Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr. He discussed the optimization techniques that the Plaxo team learned the hard way after creating their app and then having to rewrite. He mentioned a technique similar to this, I thought I heard him say they were using apache to trigger the build process. you can check out the video on my video blog.
To download WankenBerry check out the repository on google code.
So this release is pretty rough, I banged it out in about two hours and had an extremely brief peer review. As soon as the features and general idea has matured a little I’ll post a tutorial.