I spent a bit of time just now looking up some solutions. Looks like it’s not that bad to integrate Java and Ruby (e.g. JRuby or gcj + swig) so perhaps there is a worry-free way to call yuicompressor directly without installing java. When I get more time, I will look into that and see how far I can go :) But yeah, even though on Centos it doesn’t look as easy as on Ubuntu, it’s something one has to deal with to get up and running.

Thanks for suggestions.

1. Installing Java automatically is way too much work. Most linux flavors have easy way to do that. I used this article to help me install Java, which took only a few minutes. Automated approach would involve configuring, compiling everything and handling all kinds of exceptions.
2. I can’t promise that I’m gonna get to adding auto-update, but if you’d like to see it soon feel free to fork the plugin, add it, and send me a pull request on github. : )

Two thoughts: 1. Glad to see that you include the latest YUICompressor jar in the plugin! Now… if only this plugin can help install Java on the deployment machine. xD It’s such a pain to install Java on Linux. (I know this is a wishful thinking. :)

1. On this jar-inclusion thing: Perhaps you would like to include a Capistrano or Rake task to help one grab and update the jar whenever/if it releases a new version? That way, you won’t have to update this great plugin just to catch up if/when the time comes.

Thanks for sharing this neat, little plugin! If only YUICompressor has a Ruby version, I am sure this would become a very popular integration choice and plugin.

Looks good. My goal was to simply add one more step to rails already-existing concat/caching. Rails is smart enough to track asset changes and rewrite files when necessary. I’m just piggybacking on that mechanism. To test minifying in development mode all you have to do is enable caching in dev – just like when you want to see concatenation in dev mode.

Except that my plugin compresses the CSS and JS whenever those files change in development mode, so you’re ensured that your JS and CSS will compress correctly.

Thanks for the feedback. : )

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