Yellow is the New Blog

Back when I was experimenting with XIDED,  I wrote a utility database to mitigate my primary annoyances when dealing with JavaScript - in Domino in particular, but also a few general pet peeves (you'll probably notice that the recently released beta of 8.5 addresses the first of these):

• The JavaScript editor in Domino Designer is an IDE pretending to be Windows Notepad, failing in that imitation only when it occasionally maintains the current indentation from one line to the next.
• As the complexity of a web application increases, so does the hassle of maintaining all of its application-specific JavaScript in a single source file... the ink was starting to rub off on my Ctrl and F keys.
• Conversely, if you split out your source into a bunch of smaller, more maintainable files, it's a pain to merge them all back into one, so the temptation is to just throw a script tag in for each one, which tends to negatively impact page load times (even if the browser is pulling each from the cache, it still has to check each one separately to see if it's in the cache, so it might not be downloading each again, but there's still a performance hit). But then you still have to refresh the file resource for each that has been updated.
  
• At one point, the combined uncompressed size of all of my source (including the frameworks I was using in addition to my application-specific code) was just over 1.5 MB, which is ridiculous. But minification and compression added two additional steps to my "build" process.

So out of pure old-fashioned laziness, I wrote what I now call "JSFactory": once I've defined a project version document (to allow multiple versions to be maintained in different directories), listing the location of the source files in the order that they should be combined, an output location for the combined file (and - optionally - compressed, and/or gzipped... since I've configured my server to deliver gzipped content), and a file resource element to update, I can refresh that element with a single click. So I can maintain lots of little source files, doing my coding in Aptana, and then update my application without even opening Designer. It works in Windows and Linux (and presumably Mac, though I don't have one to verify that).

So if I've had this for years, why am I just mentioning it now? Well, two reasons. The first is that Chris Toohey's SOTU Sidebar Widget Demo inspired me to add a similar widget to JSFactory, which I did yesterday:



The second is that I decided to try an experiment: in a singular (and possibly only) departure from my traditional "give everything away" approach, I'm offering this for sale. As its usefulness is restricted to a very specific niche task, and future versions of Domino may make it entirely obsolete (here's hoping, anyway), I'm only charging $9.99, and I didn't bother putting in a bunch of licensing restrictions; if you buy it, it's yours to use as you see fit: donate it to your whole team (assuming you have one), put it on as many workstations or servers as you wish, modify the source (yes, I left it open), etc. I realize this means that one person could buy it and just send it around to everyone else, but I'm not looking to "make my millions" with this... I've got a dream job. I just request that if you receive a copy without having purchased it and find it useful, consider buying your own license... it's the same price as most albums on iTunes.