Combining and Compressing multiple JavaScript files into a single file in a Django project
I am an happy user of django compressor, it does combine, minify, debug-friendly, you can use it with staticfiles, easy to plug with custom storage backend (eg. S3)
The reason you want to combine many files into one is so to minimize latency of setting up and tearing down http requests, the fewer you make the better. However, many newer browsers are downloading JavaScript files in parallel (still executing sequentially). The consequence is that downloading a single 1Mb file may be slower than three 350Kb files.
you can use from CDNs.
As mentioned in the previous answer, django-compressor is nice, but you often get better loading times when using a dedicated javascript loader instead. My tip is to check out Head.js for example (http://headjs.com/) (there are tons other out there as well). Often combining scripts can be contra productive when considering caching, using javascript located on CDN:s etc.
One thing to remember is that Iphone 3/4 will just cache 15/25KB of javascript, so if you have huge scripts and combine them you can run into trouble. http://www.phpied.com/iphone-caching/