Surf can now automatically produce CSS data images by simply adding the following line to its configuration file. For Share this configuration file is located in webapps/share/WEB-INF/surf.xml.
<web-framework>
...
<generate-css-data-images>true</generate-css-data-images>
...
</web-framework>
Providing that checksum dependencies are also enabled then all images reference by CSS files will be embedded as data within those CSS files. For more information on checksum dependencies, see Surf Checksums. In addition to eliminating HTTP requests for images, when an image changes, the CSS checksum will change so the browser will not use stale cached images. The Dependency Handler service defers some of this work to a dedicated CssDataImage service which can be overridden in the Spring application context if required. All images are cached for the life-cycle of the server so that performance is not impeded when requesting the same image multiple times.