DOJO Footprint and Ajax Performance

Ajaxian reports something that I have faced in the past:

Coach Wei of Nexaweb has been spending time on the Dojo Footprint and Ajax Performance Recommendations. He ran a Dojo Performance Overhead Challenge which involved creating a simple widget with Dojo, and one from scratch:

After building and packaging the my simple Dojo widget, the custom build produces a new dojo.js that has packed all necessary files, but only the necessary file, into one single download. The footprint of this custom dojo.js is 168KB.

In contrast, if I wrote this simple widget from scratch without using Dojo, its footprint would be under 10KB(with compression, it would be under 2KB).

Given the dramatic difference in footprint, my conclusion is that Dojo is not suitable for this use scenario.

Dylan Schiemann responded discussing how the Dojo team is pushing hard to solve some of these problems.