We had to do implement a workaround for a limitation in the Dojox DataGrid component that does not have an easy way of remembering datagrid column widths adjusted by the user.

This took some time to actually get my head around, but I have managed to “will” this solution into existance. I say “will” because i’m not too happy with the implementation. It’s a workaround that works for the mean time anyway.

I’ve written the description here on the “DevProducts on Blogger” blog – Check out the post for more info: Persistent Column Widths in Dojo (dojox) DataGrids

To compress javascript I used the Code and Coffee online JavaScript compression/encoding tool, and for cleaning up the CSS, I used CleanCSS which was sent to me by a former colleague.

Code and Coffee: Compress Your JavaScript
http://www.codeandcoffee.com/2006/10/02/compress-your-javascript/
A good javascript compression tool – what I like about it is that it gives you the option of not garbling everything into one line – although you can if you wish to.
unoptimised JS size: 70kb
optimised and gzipped JS size: 21kb

CleanCSS: CSS Formatter & Optimiser
http://www.cleancss.com/index.php
A nice CSS optimiser. The unoptimised CSS for devscripts was a little bloated and used verbose shorthand for anything such as padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px; instead of padding: 10px. CleanCSS picked all this up and converted them to non-verbose/reduced shorthand. Not only that, but it also ripped out the documentation in the CSS file making for a much smaller file size.

unoptimised CSS size: 63kb
optimized and gzipped CSS size: 9kb

After this was done, I created an include script which will read all separate stylesheets into one file, then gzipped the output – but this is outside the scope of this commentary.