Simplify JS minification scheme in DXP

• Type: Epic
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Completed
• Affects Version/s: None
• Fix Version/s: None
• Component/s: Minifier
• Labels:
  • 7.4-ce-ga1
  • fc_20_11
  • fi-s-dxp
  • team_fi_epic_category_platform_architecture
• Epic/Theme:
  • FI_Platform_Evolution
• Epic Status: To Do

Epic Information

Probably one of the most common and direct suggestions to improve a page performance is to Minify Resources (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Tools like Lighthouse will flag unminified resources like CSS or JS as possible things to improve.

Currently, and for many years, DXP has a complex minification scheme that involves minifiying resources on the fly in the server.

This has caused plenty of performance and runtime issues over time and has even stalled progress because the minifiers are outdated and don't support new language features.

The goal of this Epic is to design and implement a modern and robust strategy to serve minified resources in DXP.

Acceptance Criteria

• The current minifier classes are deprecated and disabled by default
• A new mechanism (flag, setting) can be used to detect if the system is running in production or dev mode to decide which files to serve
• The new schema does not depend on runtime minification of assets
• Build process is updated to properly generate the necessary minified (and unminified) JS in build time

Test Information

Test Scenarios

Requirement	Test Scenarios	Test Priority (business impact)	Covered by frontend/backend Unit Test?	Chrome Pass/Fail	Edge Pass/Fail
LPS-123550	GIVEN fresh portal source code WHEN I build portal bundle THEN JS files are minified	5	no	n/a	n/a
LPS-123550	GIVEN downloaded bundle WHEN I check the portal.properties (\liferay-portal\portal-impl\src) THEN minifier.enabled = false AND minifier.inline.content.cache.enabled = false AND minifier.inline.content.cache.skip.css = false AND minifier.inline.content.cache.skip.javascript = false	4	no	n/a	n/a
	GIVEN nodejs.node.env=production in build.properties WHEN I start building the system THEN JS files are served AND the system is built without any error	5	yes	n/a	n/a
	GIVEN nodejs.node.env=development in build.properties WHEN I start building the system THEN Portal is built with unminified JS	4	no	n/a	n/a

QA will not test: 
-every module of Portal
-build time
-file size
-will not look for deprecated minifications
-will not check if the code is minified
-will not compared minified with unminified files

Qa will do:
-check if there are not building problems
-funcionalities are not broken (Poshi) 
-check if flag works; is possible to build Portal with minifications and without

Maight be helpful with testing: 
https://github.com/liferay/liferay-frontend-projects/pull/233
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36998995/how-to-check-if-minification-went-wrong