We have a situation where we get a designated drop location on a client\'s serve

Question

We have a situation where we get a designated drop location on a client's server for static content we develop that they in turn use in their application. Think single page application that talks to their web services but is entirely self-contained. In the past we've used Flash, so it was an easy deploy of a single .swf file and everything was kept nice and organized.

For reasons I won't get into here, we'd like to get away from using Flash but keep the same level of simplicity in their environment and our deploy process. I imagine a single file won't be possible, but the fewer the better.

Are there any patterns that can help accomplish this? The things I'm thinking of already are:

Stick to a pure Javascript and HTML template solution to package that all up into a single minified .js file.

Use sprites for fewer images.

Explanation / Answer

Stick to a pure Javascript and HTML template solution to package that all up into a single minified .js file.
Use sprites for fewer images.
These may have their own auxiliary benefits (eg. saves bandwidth by minifying JS), but I wouldn't make any changes like this purely for reasons of making my deployment more convenient.

You haven't mentioned what problems you're encountering as a result of having not having a single package, but I expect they include:

Humans forgetting changes and therefore not deploying them
Human error in the deployment process, eg. dragging things into the wrong folders
Humans taking a long time to perform the deployment process, and the time varies by the number of changes
Your production version getting out of sync with your local version due to the aggregation of mistakes and missed files
The solution to all of these issues is deployment automation. Once you're ready to deploy and changes have been made to your "master" copy (usually the master branch in your version control) the process of taking that master copy and applying those changes to the production copy should be fully automated.

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