Where do you include the jQuery library from? Google JSAPI? CDN?

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/serv

Answer 1

Without a doubt I choose to have JQuery served by Google API servers. I didn't go with the jsapi method since I don't leverage any other Google API's, however if that ever changed then I would consider it...

First: The Google api servers are distributed across the world instead of my single server location: Closer servers usually means faster response times for the visitor.

Second: Many people choose to have JQuery hosted on Google, so when a visitor comes to my site they may already have the JQuery script in their local cache. Pre-cached content usually means faster load times for the visitor.

Third: My web hosting company charges me for the bandwidth used. No sense consuming 18k per user session if the visitor can get the same file elsewhere.

I understand that I place a portion of trust on Google to serve the correct script file, and to be online and available. Up to this point I haven't been disappointed with using Google and will continue this configuration until it makes sense not to.

One thing worth pointing out... If you have a mixture of secure and insecure pages on your site you might want to dynamically change the Google source to avoid the usual warning you see when loading insecure content in a secure page:

Here's what I came up with:

UPDATE 9/8/2010 - Some suggestions have been made to reduce the complexity of the code by removing the HTTP and HTTPS and simply use the following syntax:

In addition you could also change the url to reflect the jQuery major number if you wanted to make sure that the latest Major version of the jQuery libraries were loaded:

Finally, if you don't want to use Google and would prefer jQuery you could use the following source path (keep in mind that jQuery doesn't support SSL connections):