What's the point of Yii's AssetManager?

Question

I can't find much information about Yii's AssetManager for the management of JS and CSS files. My question here is what is the point of using the AssetManager? I'm not sure what value it adds to my development process, in fact, it seems like it complicates my code... every time I change my scripts or css code, I have to go in and delete my assets folder to make sure I have the latest versions.

Seems it is much simpler to just put all Javascript files under /webroot/js/ and just use the tags to load the files instead of going through the trouble of AssetManager. Plus, Yii's registerCoreScript function always places script tags inside the header tag, instead of placing them at the bottom of the code, near the closing body tag, as recommended by YSlow.

I think there must be a gap in my understanding of Yii's AssetManager. Anybody have any ideas why using the AssetManager is better than hard-coding the script tags inside the PHP code? I'm a bit confused...

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm sure someone can answer this better than myself, but basically it's so that your source JS and CSS files can remain in your Protected folder.

This is a little more secure for one thing, but the main benefit to me is that you can compress and minify and otherwise process your assets with the asset publishing system, and it makes it easier to host your JS and CSS on a CDN since it's separate from your codebase.

Also, here's an official response from qiang (the guy who wrote Yii) about this.