CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmljspminify
700 Software
700 Software

Reputation: 87763

Is there such thing as a JSP minifier? (or Open Source HTML minifier)

This would be an HTML minifier that skips everything between <% and %>.

Actually, an Open Source HTML minifier would be a good starting place, especially if it already had code to preserve the contents certain blocks like <textarea. It's code might be able to be made to preserve <%%> blocks also.

I am aware that HTML minifiers are less common because that changes more often than JS/CSS and is often dynamically generated, but if the JSP compiler could be made to minify before making its compiled cache copy, it would result in minified HTML.

Also, an ASP minifier would probably be very close to the same thing. And I don't care about custom tags that have meaning to the server. The only stuff that matters to the server (for my company) is in the <%%> blocks.

Upvotes: 17

Views: 14052

Answers (4)

Rudolf Mayer
Rudolf Mayer

Reputation: 376

Have a look at the Trim Filter (http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/trimflt.htm), which you can simply map in your web.xml. It will help you to remove whitespace, and can also strip off comments.

From my experience, whitespace occurs a lot in JSPs if you use tags that themselves don't have any output, such a the JSTL C control tags (c:if, c:choose, ...), and then this comes in very handy.

Upvotes: 2

Nicholas Anderson
Nicholas Anderson

Reputation: 593

This question is a bit outdated but an answer with a resource still hasn't made it's way to the posting.

HtmlCompressor makes this very thing possible and quite simply.

You can use it via Java API:

String html = getHtml(); //your external method to get html from memory, file, url etc.
HtmlCompressor compressor = new HtmlCompressor();
String compressedHtml = compressor.compress(html);

Or you can use it via Taglib:

Download .jar file of the current release and put it into your lib/ directory
Add the following taglib directive to your JSP pages:

<%@ taglib uri="http://htmlcompressor.googlecode.com/taglib/compressor" prefix="compress" %>

Please note that JSP 2.0 or above is required.

In JSP:

<compress:html removeIntertagSpaces="true">
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    ...
    </html>
</compress:html>

Cheers

Upvotes: 12

Peter Štibran&#253;
Peter Štibran&#253;

Reputation: 32893

JSP is transformed to Java code and subsequntly compiled to bytecode. Minifying JSP has no purpose then.

You can process output generated by JSP page by writing custom filter. I have written filter to trim empty lines and unnecessary whitespace from JSP output, unfortunately it's not public. But if you google around, I'm sure you can find servlet filters to remove unneeded stuff from generated HTML.

Upvotes: 5

Rajendra
Rajendra

Reputation: 27

As you are already aware that HTML minification is less common and it also results in errors sometime than getting any benefit out of it. HTML is also dynamically generated content.

On the other hand, there are many better ways to speed up the application front end.

WebUtilities is a small java library to help speed up J2EE webapp front-end. Below is the link.

http://code.google.com/p/webutilities/

With new 0.0.4 version it does many optimization and results in significant performance boost. Please have a look in case you find it useful.

Upvotes: 0

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