Introducing Combres 2.0 – A Library for ASP.NET Website Optimization

Few days back i came across a solution in codeproject.com(link to Article), which was developed By Buu Nguyen

It’s a .NET library which enables combination, minification, compression, and caching of JavaScript and CSS resources for ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC web applications, which will help us in improve performance of our ASP.NET web applications.

Resources are always time taking to load. The resources in the sense i will discuss only about the Javascript libraries here.

Optimizing the web application for extreme performance is event web application developers dream and job. If the web application responds faster handles load in multi user environment can be pretty interesting to see and we can happily say we made a successful website.

So what does Combres 2.0 does. It’s an on open source / freely distributable library submitted with CodeProject.com, one of the worlds best code sharing / knowledge sharing  community on Application Development, mostly Microsoft .NET technologies. Supported by lots of Experts aroung the globe, sharing their knowledge in a community.

Before coming to Combres 2.0, i will tell about something why combres 2.0 is built for. 

 As a ASP.NET developer you will be using lots of javascript libraries in your web applications, for User Interface(UI) effects, ajax functionality and providing much for user friendly interface we will consume lots of javascript libraries in our web applications.

So when a related ASP.NET page loads, all these javascript libraries have to be  individually fetched from the Web Server. So if you have 10 libraries to load from the web server and 1000 users are accessing the website simultaniously. How much fetch request would come to web server  10 x 1000. This is normal case, suppose if it’s a banking website or auction web site or a social networking site, how many users would be accessing the website at a time. We can’t predict right, on an average only we can tell,  we could expect xxxxxxx number of hits to the server.

What about if we can optimize our web application a bit by combining all 10 javascript libraries and sent it as a single resource file.  So it would be 1x 1000 = 1000 fetches comparing to our previous determination based on individual files fetching 10 x 1000 = 10000, so we saved 9000 fetch requests. Cool na.

So this what Combres 2.0 is for, to help make our web applications to perform faster by reducing the effective fetch requests to web server.

In short, Combres helps combine, minify, compress, append appropriate headers and cache JavaScript and CSS resources in your application. All you need to do are creating an XML config file describing what you want Combres to do and adding a few lines of code to register and use Combres in your applications.

This is just an introduction, you could read more about Combres 2.0, please visit the CodeProject Article link  and thanks to CodeProject and  Buu Nguyen, for such a nice interesting helpful article.