About

BTM-Packager was created to allow for easier development of large JavaScript/CSS files/libraries. The initial demand for this was the BTM-JS library.

History

The initial idea came from examining the Prototype source files. Because of their background with Ruby on Rails, the Prototype team uses a Rake process to build the separate JS source files into a single prototype.js. I didn't particularly like the way their process worked, having extra non JavaScript code in the source files, but I liked the result: logically separated source, and an easy to build single-file result.

An interim solution using a series of shell scripts expanded the scope to include the following:

• automatic code compression & encoding for both JavaScript and CSS
• generating documentation for both JavaScript and CSS
• inserting license details into output files

Requirements

• PHP5. I have no plans to support PHP4.
• Nicolas Martin's PHP port of Dean Edwards' Packer is used for compressing & encoding JavaScript files.
• Growl (Mac/Windows)is used for reporting (optional)

Future

BTM-Packager is still being improved, below are some of the current plans:

• Support for the {less} CSS system
• More IDE plugins
• Generate documentation from source files, using JSDoc Toolkit and CSSDoc

Availability

Currently BTM-Packager is available as:

• a script to run from a command shell (Windows/Mac/Linux); and
• as a plugin for Coda

Download

Coming soon, I promise!