Creating javascript files with .php extension

Question

I have been writing javascript functions in separate .js files. In my last project, the number of javascript files were more and so loading of the page was slower because number of requests were more. So for experimental purpose, i converted few .js files with .php extension and added them with include statements. This way the loading time performance was better. There are lot of advantages of writing javascript in .php files. I can access the php variables and easily pass them to javascript.

My doubt here is that, are there any disadvantages of writing javascript in .php files and then including them ?

What i understand is that when a page loads, it calls the javascript files and parallelly executes the php part. So we write onload functions.

Answer 1

If you'd like to compile multiple Javascript files into one on the server side with PHP, you can do something like this:

<?php
// script.js
header('Content-Type: text/javascript'); // Tell browser to treat file as Javascript

$files  = array(
    'script-1.js',
    'script-2.js',
    'script-3.js'
);

foreach($files as $file){
    // Import each file
    echo file_get_contents($file).PHP_EOL;
}

Then, in your page, just reference that file as though it was a Javascript file:

...
<script src="script.php"></script>
...