If you want to have Wicket do your voodoo during development, but then have Maven collapse everything during packaging, you'll need some sort of shared storage for the configuration (you don't want to have to maintain it in two places). That's the purpose of the properties file in my example. It's consumed by CFML and Ant rather than Wicket and Maven, but the idea is the same.

One subtlety is that the CFM file which reads the properties file in development is replaced by Ant with a reference to the aggregated/minified file. You could do this with a conditional in your Wicket code (to load individual or aggregate assets) as well.

I use apache Wicket; which tends to allow Header Aggregation across multiple pages. Example:

TEMPLATE PAGE:
… import scripts for all site …

CUSTOM PAGE extends TEMPLATE
… import for the page …

FINAL OUT PAGE :

… import scripts for all site …
… import for the page …

Now if Im aggregating, what Id like is for the TEMPLATE link to be replaced in the HTML (fine that can be done manually easily) …. but more so to remove the Links that are being aggregated from the various pages.

Thing is during DEVELOPMENT, its useful to know which script is responsible for which page. And hence I want this @ Build or Deploy time to run over the out WAR.

I guess im going way beyond the scope of this intent. But if you know anything that can help in this also Id appreciate it.

Thanks a ton

If you're using Maven, just use the YUI compressor plugin:

<groupId>net.alchim31.maven</groupId>
<artifactId>yuicompressor-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.3.0</version>

Yes, you're absolutely right. I've added a note to that effect at the bottom of the post.

Looking very cool. This is way beyond my scope of experience, but I like what I think I see :) At the very least, I should check out this YUI Compressor.

http://www.thecrumb.com/wiki/ant#javascript_and_css_compression