the expense of features

February 10th, 2007 by

With Dojo, we’ve recently been discussing splitting up the toolkit into better, easier to digest, less “expensive” code. To which I asked myself, what does expensive mean, for the creators and users of Dojo?

  • download size
  • number of requests
  • CPU utilization
  • memory usage
  • # of browser/scenario forks
  • complexity/time to get started
  • error-proneness
  • maintainability
  • testability
  • marketability
  • interoperability
  • competitiveness
  • distribution

2 Comments »

2 Responses to “the expense of features”

  1. on 06 Mar 2007 at 14:371 Elaine Haight

    I guess I think that the first item you listed “download size” is the most valuable “expense”, because this is the most important to the end user. If my page takes forever to download, noone will look at it!

  2. on 18 Mar 2007 at 14:532 Dylan

    Hi Elaine, it was great visiting your Ajax class this week! Download size is highly important… of course, I could write the most innocuous 1K JavaScript that would hang any browser. The emergence of tools like Firebug make it much easier to see which pieces of code are taking long to both load and execute, which is highly useful!

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