[Background: I am beginning to abstract/distill my current application into something more general, where the GUI can be customized through an administrative interface without the admins having to touch GUI related code.]
There was a post a while back regarding OGNL parsing of assets like CSS. This is along the same line, but with the parsing/generation done in Java code and only done once in a while. The resulting textual data representing the CSS would be persisted in an ASO or static. I have been thinking about an approach to the issue of CSS not supporting constants, which could be useful for things like colors, background images, user-driven style changes, etc. On this page http://icant.co.uk/articles/cssconstants/ the author notes SSI and server side scripting using languages like php, jsp, etc. I'd prefer to have the variables for my CSS be set and manipulated inside my Java code, which can possibly be changed on the fly. (Though if the browser is able to cache the CSS "file", changes may not be picked up immediately if the header does not expire) Are there real benefits for my application server (i.e. Tomcat) to serve a concrete file, versus pulling a pre-baked one straight from RAM? Is there a way to fake the response for a CSS file request, so that the CSS comes from something like a Stream instead of an actual file? (So the browser wouldn't know the difference, and would cache it, etc) Of course we wouldn't want to inline all the css text, because I expect a couple hundred lines at least (My current optimized CSS has about 4000 lines across a few files) I guess this is a larger version of whatever issues we would have with the rounded corner service in T4, which is said to handle caching issues automagically. http://tapestry.apache.org/tapestry4.1/developmentguide/hivemind/roundedcorners.html
