Assets Management

What are assets?

A web page consists of a base HTML document and any additional files it may include, such as stylesheets, scripts, images and fonts. We will refer to these additional files as assets.

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Most of the focus in XOOPS asset management is on stylesheet and script assets.

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Assets are a very important part of the user experience. For today's rich, highly interactive web applications, the asset performance may be more significant than the backend application and database performance.

Assets Performance Factors

There are several factors that influence the performance of assets:

• Asset size

• Number of files

• Latency

  • Network speed

    • Connection set up an tear down

    • Transfer rate

    • Currency limits

  • Client capacity

    • Processing power/load

    • Memory

    • Cache speed*

In order to address these issues, and to minimize the impact, there are different strategies for Assets Management:

• Minimize file sizes

• Combine files to reduce network connections

• Serve assets as static files to maximize caching

• Avoid concurrency bottlenecks

  • Assets that include other assets when loaded

Of course, there are different strategies for Development, and different for Deployment:

Develop / Debug	Deployment Focus
Easy to read and edit is essential	Eliminate formatting and whitespace
Separate files are easier to work with and may come from different sources	Combine files to eliminate latency

Asset management solves the development vs. deployment dilemma by using the exact same sources for both needs.