How to optimize Dojo loading time?

Question

I'm working on a business application built upon PHP & Dojo tool kit. The interface is similar that you see on dojo dijit theme tester.

On internet it takes lot of time to load all those js one by one..

I want to know what is the best technique that is being used by theme tester demo that it loads much faster than one we built.?

I'm interested to know the best practices on optimizing its loading time?

Answer 1

You have rightly observed the biggest cause of runtime performance issue is the many many roundtrips it is doing to the server to fetch the small JS files. While the modularized design of Dojo is very beneficial at design time (widget extensions, namespacing etc), at runtime, it is expected you optimize the dojo bits - the way to do that is to do a custom build.

Doing a custom build will give you a big performance boost - the hundreds of roundtrips will be reduced to one or 2 and the size of the payload will also dramatically decrease. We have seen a 50x performance improvement with custom build

Custom build will create an optimized, minified JS file that will contain only the code you use in the app. You can define multiple layers depending on how you want to segregate your application JS files (for example, one single compressed file versus multiple files included in different UIs) depending on the version of dojo you are using, see:

http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.7/build/index.html#build-index http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.7/build/pre17/build.html#build-pre17-build

While it looks daunting at first, sitck with it and you will be able to create an optimized version and see the benefits :)