Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Performance Considerations

Tip

This section touches on some of the low-hanging fruit that you can strive to achieve in your frontend engineering. For a fabulous reference on ways to improve performance, be sure to check out High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers by Steve Souders (O'Reilly). It's a quick read and really does live up to the "essential" part of the title. Much of the content is available at http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html.

While writing good JavaScript goes a long way toward having a snappy web application, there are a few considerations to be particularly cognizant of when it comes time for production. The topic of optimizing a web application's performance could be the subject of an entire book on its own, but the following list captures some of the most obvious low-hanging fruit that you can go after:

Dojo's build tools

The build tools accomplish a number of essential tasks for you and the effort required on your behalf is trivial. The build process minifies your source, reducing the overall size of the payload, and significantly reduces the HTTP latency by consolidating multiple JavaScript files into layers and interning template strings where applicable.

Lazy loading

While much has been said in this chapter on the virtues of using the build tools to create a minimal number of layer files for your application, there will certainly be times when it just makes more sense to do some lazy loading. For example, if you determine ...