Optimizing Toscawidgets Resources

Toscawidgets uses a lot of static files for its widgets. Having those files served by the middleware is quite inefficient and doesn’t usually provide any extra feature, so it is usually a good idea to let a web server directly serve them.

Extracting static files

People at Toscawidgets know this and have been so kind to provide a way to extract all the static files needed by the widgets that your application is currently using and since Turbogears 2.1.1 this command is directly exposed when you quickstart a new application.

Static resources can be extracted by using:

python setup.py archive_tw_resources

By default the static files will be extracted to your project public directory, and if you had properly configured your web server or are using a proxy server you should end up having your public directory directly served by you webserver instead of passing through toscawidgets middleware.

Compressing static files

By default turbogears won’t compress your static files, it will just extract them. This is because static files compression requires a working java environment and the YUICompressor tool.

If you want to enable extracted files compression you just have to modify your setup.cfg by uncommenting those two lines:

#yuicompressor = /home/someuser/bin/yuicompressor.jar
#compresslevel = 2

The first one must point to your YUICompressor executable and the second one can be used to specify the compression level.