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About: ChainfireBuild

ChainfireBuild is a web project 'build tool' taking care of various things related to CSS, JavaScript, PHP and Apache.

It consists of a number of Apache configuration files, a PHP development strategy, some PHP handlers, jQuery handlers, and of course the ChainfireBuild executable.

What this whole process completely automates is - among other things - the following:
- Creating both minified and GZIP'd JavaScript files
- Creating both minified and GZIP'd CSS files
- Automatic conversion of proper CSS to IE6 and IE7 specific CSS files and generation of JavaScript files needed to handle IE problems which cannot be properly solved with just CSS, while maintaining an almost perfect look when JavaScript is not available.
- Automatic data file versioning, also modifying CSS/JavaScript/PHP files to include version numbers in linked/used files (by default files are cached forever, 'changed' files get a new filename on the client, but the same filename is used internally on the server)
- Automatic decision making based on client capabilities of which files to use when
- Complete seperation between test and production builds

In the end the result of all this is easy maintainability for my web projects, optimal caching, and thus fewer requests and faster websites.

This tool is not publicly available (yet).