Shinkansen, My New Project, Is Up On CodePlex

A couple of days ago I launched my latest project, Shinkansen, on CodePlex (overview and documentation).

Overview

In a nutshell, Shinkansen is a sever control + HTTP handler combo which allows you declare your JavaScript and CSS includes like you normally would, and have them:

• HTTP compressed
• Crunched (minified and so on)
• Combined into a single download
• Cached on the client

Most of these tasks you can perform on your own.

For example, you can configure HTTP compression in IIS. However, it's possible only if you have physical access to a web server and are allowed to edit the metabase (IIS6) or tweak IIS settings (IIS7) by hand.

You can minify JavaScript as a step of a build process, but how do you combine scripts, and how do you set cache expiration headers?

Having dealt with these disparate tasks before, I wanted to build a component to streamline it all.

Resources

As I mention in Resources, two books in particular were of great inspiration: High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. Much of the ideas from these books have been incorporated into the project.

Also, two Firefox add-ons were of great help: Google's  Page Speed and Yahoo's YSlow.

Feedback

Feel free to download binaries or source code and play. I will definitely appreciate suggestions and bug reports.