Rich Internet applications that heavily rely on JavaScript and CSS require some optimization to work properly. For instance JavaScript files need to be as compact as possible to fasten the load of the application, this is also true for CSS files.

When building a complex application in JavaScript, it also important to validate that the code is correct. JavaScript is not a compiled language and permissive in many ways, it is therefore very important to be able to check that the code is correct.

ZWT uses JavaScript objects and loads the dependencies between classes using a dynamic loading system. We wanted to provide a very clean API with isolated classes to ease the maintenance and make the framework as intuitive as possible, however this increase the loading time of the applications.

ZWT Tools have been created to answer these issues and much more. They can for instance be used outside the scope of ZWT to validate or optimize any JavaScript code.

• zwt-tools:js-compile compiles and optimizes JavaScript files.
• zwt-tools:zjs-compile compiles ZWT JavaScript files following the Zeleos guidelines.
• zwt-tools:zuidl-compile compiles ZUIDL XML files to generate JavaScript, CSS and HTML files from ZUIDL files.
• zwt-tools:zjs-package packages one or more ZWT classes into one or more optimized JavaScript files.
• zwt-tools:zjs-merge merges two ZWT JavaScript files following the Zeleos guidelines.
• zwt-tools:zcss-merge merges two CSS files following the Zeleos guidelines (the parser used doesn't fully support the CSS grammar).
• zwt-tools:ztheme-package packages a Zeleos Web Toolkit theme.

General instructions on how to use the ZWT Tools Plugin can be found on the usage page. Some more specific use cases are described in the examples given below.

To provide you with better understanding on some usages of the ZWT Tools Plugin, you can take a look into the following examples:

Compiling JavaScript