JavaScript Web Applications

Chapter 10. Deploying

Deploying your web application properly is just as important as actually developing it; there’s no point in building the next Facebook if it loads too slowly for people to actually use it. Users want your site to be as reliable and fast as possible, with good uptime. Deploying JavaScript and HTML files sounds straightforward—they’re static assets after all—but there’s actually a fair amount to it. This is an often neglected part to web application building.

Luckily, there are a few tried-and-tested techniques that should apply to all JavaScript applications, and indeed serving any kind of static assets. If you follow the recommendations below, you should be well on your way to delivering speedy web apps.

Performance

One of the simplest ways of increasing performance is also the most obvious: minimize the amount of HTTP requests. Every HTTP request contains a lot of header information, as well as the TCP overhead. Keeping separate connections to an absolute minimum will ensure pages load faster for users. This clearly extends to the amount of data the server needs to transfer. Keeping a page and its assets’ file size low will decrease any network time—the real bottleneck to any application on the Web.

Concatenating scripts into a single script and combining CSS into a single stylesheet will reduce the amount of HTTP connections needed to render the page. You can do this upon deployment or at runtime. If it’s the latter, make sure any files generated are cached in ...