If you aren't using gzip, you're crazy. But gzipping is one small piece of the puzzle. Even the simplest web application would benefit from the concatenation and minification of its scripts. Plus, as it turns out, those aren't the only things that real apps need to do.
In Cappuccino, we have a whole suite of tools that operate on applications, and Jake is the conductor. Our preprocessor gets run ahead of time before deploying for performance, a process easily automated with Jake. Images get base64'd and combined into a single file to improve download speed and perceived performance, again completely automated with Jake. We have a tool to strip dead code that Jake knows how to run, and a tool that combines apps into a single file as well.
Our jake scripts handle our deployment process too, creating zip files of everything that's relevant and preparing them for upload to our servers, incrementing version numbers automatically, etc. Turns out automation is important.
Not to mention that even if it were the case that gzipping were enough, closure-compiler is actually specifically designed to generate code that gzips to smaller sized (those google guys know what they're doing ;))
Anyway, I agree that there are lots of little tricks, and you've got me thinking now. My only gripe with spriting images etc has been the pain of maintenance. If that's taken away with nice automation, well, that could be very good indeed :)
If you look at the end of the article we link to the post explaining our unique way of handling image spriting that is completely automatic in Cappuccino projects.
In Cappuccino, we have a whole suite of tools that operate on applications, and Jake is the conductor. Our preprocessor gets run ahead of time before deploying for performance, a process easily automated with Jake. Images get base64'd and combined into a single file to improve download speed and perceived performance, again completely automated with Jake. We have a tool to strip dead code that Jake knows how to run, and a tool that combines apps into a single file as well.
Our jake scripts handle our deployment process too, creating zip files of everything that's relevant and preparing them for upload to our servers, incrementing version numbers automatically, etc. Turns out automation is important.