Microsoft Doloto: Making Ajax page downloads faster

Microsoft is making available for download a tool developed by Microsoft Research that is designed to make Web pages more responsive by decreasing the initial download size of Ajax applications.

That tool, known as Doloto, analyzes Ajax app workloads and performs code splitting of large Web apps. That way, apps can transfer initially only the part of the client-size JavaScript code needed for application initialization. The rest of the function code is transferred later, according to Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division Soma Somasegar, who blogged about Doloto on September 4.

Microsoft is moving the Doloto project to its Dev Labs incubator, home of a number of other developer-focused prototypes, including the Axum parallel-processing language and CHESS concurrency testing tool.

According to the Dev Labs site:

"Doloto reduces the size of initial application code download by hundreds of kilobytes or as much as 50% of the original download size. The time to download and begin interacting with large applications is reduced by 20-40% or dozens of seconds...depending on the application and wide-area network conditions."

Doloto is short for "Download Time Optimizer" and is also the Russian word for chisel, according ot the Microsoft Research site.