I thought others might be interested in this. This howto assumes you are already using Apache as your frontend proxy. No special Apache modules are necessary.
Firstly assume your apache config looks something like:
<VirtualHost 192.168.70.222>
ServerName mydomain.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://127.0.0.1:8000/$1 [P,L]
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8000/
</VirtualHost>
First lets bypass AOLServer for our /resources/ urls. No point invoking two servers for non-permissioned static files:
<VirtualHost 192.168.70.222>
ServerName mydomain.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/resources/([^/]+)/(.*) /your_openacs_dir/packages/$1/www/resources/$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://127.0.0.1:8000/$1 [P,L]
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8000/
</VirtualHost>
Ok, that works - now lets prepare our css and js files by pre-compressing them:
for file in `find openacs-4 -name '*.css' -or -name '*.js'`; do cat $file | gzip > ${file}gz; done
Now lets serve those files if the browser can handle it:
<VirtualHost 192.168.70.222>
ServerName mydomain.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteRule (.*)\.css$ $1\.cssgz
AddType "text/css;charset=UTF-8" .cssgz
AddEncoding gzip .cssgz
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteRule (.*)\.js$ $1\.jsgz
AddType "text/javascript;charset=UTF-8" .jsgz
AddEncoding gzip .jsgz
RewriteRule ^/resources/([^/]+)/(.*) /your_openacs_dir/packages/$1/www/resources/$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://127.0.0.1:8000/$1 [P,L]
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8000/
</VirtualHost>
Note that this will break in a number of cases eg. if you have .vuh files that create css or js files for urls ending in .js or .css. If you have such a setup I'm sure you can figure it out ;)
