Zazl Optimizer integrated into Maqetta

The Maqetta project is a great new tool for building HTML5 based user interfaces. One of its features is a "preview" option that allows developers to view the pages they have assembled. This functionality runs as an AMD based webpage loading all of its AMD modules individually. The load time of the preview can be significantly affected when running the preview in a high latency environment as each module load is an individual HTTP request. Typically the fix for this is to run some form of build tool that will concatenate all the modules together so that only one HTTP request is required. However, as the pages are assembled dynamically in Maqetta performing a static build is not really a viable option.

This is where Zazl can help. The Zazl AMD Optimizer supports dynamic optimizations such as module concatenation and can be typically integrated with minimal coding. Maqetta is OSGi based so Zazl must run in its OSGi mode as a set of OSGi bundles.

One of my main goals of the integration was to be as unobtrusive as possible in regard to the Maqetta source modifications. Only 2 core modifications were required :

1. Modify the generated preview URL to include a "zazl=true" parameter when Zazl is required to handle the preview.
2. Ensure that a raw version of Dojo was available for Zazl to use. Zazl requires that the AMD modules it analyzes have not been built with another build tool. Unfortunately the Dojo that Maqetta uses for preview has already been run through the Dojo build tool. Maqetta uses an ajaxLibrary Eclipse Extension Point to register paths to different libraries. A new extension instance for the raw Dojo code was added so that it did not interfere with the existing ajaxLibrary extension for the built version of Dojo.

With the Maqetta modifications in place some bootstrap code is required to setup the Zazl runtime so that it can intecept the preview URL requests and ensure that the Zazl AMD loader is used to load the AMD modules. You can see all of the bootstrap code here.

Modifications have to be made to the Preview's HTML page to ensure that the Zazl AMD loader is configured and loaded. A JEE Filter is a great tool for intercepting HTTP requests and responses. A Filter was written and configured within Maqetta to catch the preview requests and look for the "zazl=true" URL parameter. If matched an HTML parser (written using a Java Library called NekoHTML) is used to parse the HTML looking for the Dojo script tag. The parser switches the script tag with one that loads the Zazl AMD loader and also sets up the configuration.

In addition to creating the JEE Filter for the preview the bootstrap code has to ensure that the Zazl javascript servlet is configured and running and also that Zazl Resource Loading requests can find resources within the Maqetta environment. Both the JEE Filter and the Zazl javascript servlet are registered in an OSGi Activator run within a bootstap OSGi bundle called maqetta.zazl. This Activator also creates an instance of a custom Zazl Resource Loader that understands how to obtain resources from the Maqetta environment. Maqetta provides its own virtual directory API that can be used by this custom Resource Loader to obtain URL's to the resources.

The bootstrap code includes one other component. When the preview webpage is loaded it now has a reference to the Zazl AMD Loader. The Maqetta environment must be able to find this resource which resides in one of the Zazl Optimizers bundles. To achieve this the Zazl Optimizer bundle has to register an ajaxLibrary Eclipse Plugin Extension, I didn't want to contaminate the Zazl code with Maqetta specific references so an OSGi fragment bundle was created to add the required Eclipse Metadata. You see this fragment bundle here.

This integration also had to handle how the Zazl OSGi bundles would be integrated into the Maqetta git repository. The Maqetta git repository use submodules to reference its third-party dependencies. Providing direct submodule links to the Zazl git repositories on github would not work well as Zazl itself has a build step that has to be run. I decided the best way to handle this was to provide Zazl Release git repositories hosted on github.

There are 2 staging repositories:

1. One contains the build output of Zazl with tags marking specific versions.
2. The other contains the binary dependencies that Zazl requires to run.

This provides a nice controlled way for Maqetta to be upgraded to new versions of the Zazl Optimizer.

You can try all of this out by loading Maqetta. Developer setup details can be found here. The Preview7 Release, when available, will contain Zazl. It will be found here.

Optimizing with AMD JavaScript loaders - Part 2

This is the second part, an update might be a better description,  for my earlier blog post Optimizing with AMD JavaScript Loaders. Since then Dojo 1.7 is now in GA and I have updated the Zazl Dynamic Optimizer to support optimizing Dojo 1.7 based applications.

I had originally wanted to have the optimizer work generically with AMD compliant loaders and also be able to optimize plugin references using the referenced plugins themselves, however it became obvious that this is not a reasonable goal to achieve with the state that AMD spec is currently in. The result of this is that the optimizer provides its own AMD loader (similar to Almond in that it expects all the modules to be part of the javascript stream) and also supports its own server-side plugin API that allows for custom optimizations to be applied where possible.

The Zazl Optimizer's AMD Loader

As the optimizer ensures all the required AMD modules are part of the javascript stream delivered to the client there is no need for the loader to fully support asynchronous loading. I also found that the loader had to support modules that contained references to the local "require" function. The loader will ensure that modules referenced from "define" calls will be present in the initial javascript stream. If modules contain calls to the local "require" the loader will make additional XHR calls back to the optimizer  to load the "required" module along with its dependencies, again in a single response.

Another value-add feature that the loader provides is the ability to preload a cache that is made available to modules via  a "cache" property on the require object. The cache property is not part of the AMD spec but the Dojo AMD loader provides this support. This enables optimizations to be made for plugins such as the dojo/text plugin. Using a server-side extension the cache is preloaded with the text value that the plugin will provide, thus avoid and additional XHR call to load the resource.

Configuring the zazl loader

The entry point into Optimizers AMD loader is called "zazl". If follows a similar pattern to how my lsjs AMD loader had defined its entry point. For example :

zazl({
    packages: [
        {
            name: 'dojo',
            location: 'dojo',
            main:'main'
        },
        {
            name: 'dijit',
            location: 'dijit',
            main:'main'
        },
        {
            name: 'dojox',
            location: 'dojox',
            main:'main'
        }
    ]
},
["amdtest/Calendar"],
function(calendar) {
    console.log("done");
});

Additionally, an zazl.json file has to be provided on the server-side.

Here is an example of the zazl.json file :

{
    "bootstrapModules" : ["loader/amd/zazl.js"],
    "debugBootstrapModules" : ["loader/amd/zazl.js"],
    "amdconfig" : {
        "plugins" : {
            "dojo/has" : {
                "proxy": "optimizer/amd/plugins/dojo/has",
                "has" : {
                    "host-browser" : 1,
                    "dom" : 1,
                    "dojo-dom-ready-api" : 1,
                    "dojo-sniff" : 1
                }
            },
            "dojo/text" : {
                "proxy": "optimizer/amd/plugins/dojo/text"
            },
            "dojo/selector/_loader" : {
                "proxy": "optimizer/amd/plugins/dojo/selector/_loader",
                "defval": "dojo/selector/lite"
            },
            "dojox/gfx/renderer" : {
                "proxy": "optimizer/amd/plugins/dojox/gfx/renderer",
                "defval": "dojox/gfx/svg"
            }
        },
        "i18nPluginId" : "dojo/i18n"
    },
    "type" : "amd"
}
 Optimizing plugin references

Having given up on loading and running the plugins themselves on the server-side I faced the reality that to support frameworks like Dojo I would have to provide server-side equivalents for some of the plugins the Dojo provides. As the server-side was already providing a commonjs loader environment I decided to write these plugin proxies just as commonjs modules.

A server-side plugin proxy is configured via the zazl.json configuration file.
For example :

"plugins" : {
    "dojo/has" : "optimizer/amd/plugins/dojo/has",
    "dojo/text" : "optimizer/amd/plugins/dojo/text",
    "dojo/selector/_loader" : "optimizer/amd/plugins/dojo/selector/_loader",
    "dojox/gfx/renderer" : "optimizer/amd/plugins/dojox/gfx/renderer"

}

A plugin proxy can provide two exports :

1) write(pluginName, normalizedName, callback, moduleUrl) - the return value from the callback is written into the javascript stream.
2) normalize(id, config, expand) - the returned value is used to determine if the plugin has additional dependencies that need to be included in the javascript response stream.

The "config" param for both calls is value specified for the "amdconfig" property in zazl.json.

dojo/has

The dojo/has plugin is used to determine whether to dynamically include other modules based on a "has" configuration. This provides a challenge for how to deal with this in an optimized environment. I chose to provide my own server-side version of the has plugin that used its own configuration. It provides  a "normalize" function that is used to direct the optimizer to include these additional dependencies. The "has" configuration is provided in the zazl.json configuration file.

dojo/text

The dojo/text plugin is used to load in text resource dependencies. Ideally, in a optimized environment you would want the optimizer to ensure these text resources are included in the javascript response stream in a form that avoids additional downloads. The dojo/text plugin makes use of a "require.cache" property to populate a cache. The zazl AMD loader supports populating the cache by providing an "addToCache" function. The server-side version of the dojo/text plugin writes calls to this function that are included into the javascript response stream.

function jsEscape(content) {
    return content.replace(/(['\\])/g, '\\$1')
        .replace(/[\f]/g, "\\f")
        .replace(/[\b]/g, "\\b")
        .replace(/[\n]/g, "\\n")
        .replace(/[\t]/g, "\\t")
        .replace(/[\r]/g, "\\r");
};

exports.write = function(pluginName, moduleName, write, moduleUrl) {
    var textContent = require('zazlutil').resourceloader.readText(moduleUrl);
    if (textContent) {
        write("zazl.addToCache('"+moduleName+"', '"+jsEscape(textContent)+"');\n");
    }
};

This ensures that when the client-side version it will find the cache value and avoid an XHR call to obtain the resource.

dojo/selector/_loader

The dojo/selector/_loader plugin determines what selector engine to use. The client side version expects a true browser environment to be available to determine the required engine type. This not something that can be determined easily in an optimized environment so for now the server side version I have written provides a "normalize" method that simply returns the default "lite" module id.

exports.normalize = function(id, config, expand) {
    return "dojo/selector/lite";
};

The optimizer ensures that this module, along with its dependencies, is included in the javascript response stream. I plan to make the value returned configurable.

dojox/gfx/renderer

The dojox/gfx/renderer plugin works in a similar fashion to the dojo/selector/_loader plugin. It currently returns a default value of "dojox/gfx/svg" via a provided "normalize" function.


i18n plugin support


Optimizing i18n plugin support is more complicated that other types of plugins due to the need to provide i18n message bundles based on the locale of the calling client. The other optimized plugins produce output that can be cached and included for ever request for the same AMD module and its dependencies. The i18n output must be generated for each request made.


Because of this I have made the i18n plugin support a special case and there is specialized code that produces the message bundles. The "dojo/i18n" plugin supports the same format of messages as the requirejs i18n plugin does. The zazl configuration files specifies a property that indicates the module id of the i18n plugin. When the optimizer encounters an i18n plugin reference the details are used by the javascript response renderer to include the specified message bundles based on the locale of calling client. When rendered into the client the client i18n plugin finds that the messages bundles have been loaded in and avoid XHR requests to load them.


What's next ?

• Currently the optimizer is only usable in a Java JEE WebContainer environment that requires you to write your frontend HTML resources as JSP's. I now have a working HTML filter that enables developers to write HTML resources instead. The HTML is parsed for AMD module references. The HTML filter inserts the required javascript tag to load the module and all its dependencies based on the parser results. My next blog post will provide more details on how the HTML filter works.
• I plan to also provide a version of both the AMD optimizer and HTML filter for node.js.
• So far I have focused on making the optimizer support Dojo based applications. As jquery and other javascript frameworks are now supporting AMD I plan to ensure the optimizer supports applications using these frameworks too.

You can get more details on trying out the AMD optimizer here.

Update: 

I have improved the configuration such that it is not duplicated in zazl.json. I have also written a blog post about the HTML filtering approach to inserting the required script tags