Doloto: Putting the Responsiveness Back Into Web 2.0

At times, Web 2.0 can be too much of a good thing -- especially when it comes to code. Granted, AJAX improves the responsiveness of network-bound applications. However, moving execution from back-end servers to clients means more code locally, which means taking more time to download more code -- you get the idea.

Doloto is an AJAX application-optimization tool designed to address this problem. Developed by Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman, researchers in Microsoft Research's Runtime Analysis and Design group and Internet Services Research Center, respectively, Doloto analyzes application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications. Once processed by Doloto, an application will transfer only the portion of code necessary for application initialization. The rest of the application's code is replaced by short stubs.

To demo Doloto, Livshits and Kiciman performed experiments on several large Web 2.0 appps. Doloto reduced the size of initial application code download by hundreds of kilobytes -- as much as 50% of the original download size. Page-loading time for JavaScript-heavy applications improved by as much as 40%, depending on the application and network conditions.

According to Livshits, "We start with the original JavaScript codebase, and we take out every function that doesn't need to be downloaded and replace it with a small stub. A function might be half a kilobyte, and we replace it with a stub that’s about 60 bytes. This is where the space and time savings come from. And the stub is going to download the actual body of code whenever necessary."

For details on how Doloto works, see Doloto: Code Splitting for Network-Bound Web 2.0 Applications. You can download Doloto here.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:29 AM  Permalink