Where do you include the jQuery library from? Goog

Question

There are a few ways to include jQuery and jQuery UI and I'm wondering what people are using?

• Google JSAPI
• jQuery's site
• your own site/server
• another CDN

I have recently been using Google JSAPI, but have found that it takes a long time to setup an SSL connection or even only to resolve google.com. I have been using the following for Google:

<script src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>
google.load('jquery', '1.3.1');
</script>

I like the idea of using Google so it's cached when visiting other sites and to save bandwidth from our server, but if it keeps being the slow portion of the site, I may change the include.

What do you use? Have you had any issues?

Edit: Just visited jQuery's site and they use the following method:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>

Edit2: Here's how I've been including jQuery without any problems for the last year:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.3/jquery.min.js"></script>

The difference is the removal of http:. By removing this, you don't need to worry about switching between http and https.

Answer 1

If I am responsible for the 'live' site I better be aware of everything that is going on and into my site. For that reason I host the jquery-min version myself either on the same server or a static/external server but either way a location where only I (or my program/proxy) can update the library after having verified/tested every change

Answer 2

I wouldn't want any public site that I developed to depend on any external site, and thus, I'd host jQuery myself.

Are you willing to have an outage on your site when the other (Google, jquery.com, etc.) goes down? Less dependencies is the key.

Answer 3

One reason you might want to host on an external server is to work around the browser limitations of concurent connections to particular server.

However, given that the jQuery file you are using will likely not change very often, the browser cache will kick in and make that point moot for the most part.

Second reason to host it on external server is to lower the traffic to your own server.

However, given the size of jQuery, chances are it will be a small part of your traffic. You should probably try to optimize your actual content.

Answer 4

Pros: Host on Google has benefits

• Probably faster (their servers are more optimised)
• They handle the caching correctly - 1 year (we struggle to be allowed to make the changes to get the headers right on our servers)
• Users who have already had a link to the Google-hosted version on another domain already have the file in their cache

Cons:

• Some browsers may see it as XSS cross-domain and disallow the file.
• Particularly users running the NoScript plugin for Firefox

I wonder if you can INCLUDE from Google, and then check the presence of some Global variable, or somesuch, and if absence load from your server?