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Dooooomed! Doomed I tell you!http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/90339
I just got to announce the Google AJAX Libraries API which exists to make Ajax applications that use popular frameworks such as Prototype, Script.aculo.us, jQuery, Dojo, and MooTools faster and easier for developers.Whenever I wrote an application that uses one of these frameworks, I would picture a user accessing my application, having 33 copies of prototype.js, and yet downloading yet another one from my site. It would make me squirm. What a waste!At the same time, I was reading research from Steve Souders and others in the performance space that showed just how badly we are doing at providing these libraries. As developers we should setup the caching correctly so we only send that file down when absolutely necessary. We should also gzip the files to browsers that accept them. Oh, and we should probably use a minified version to get that little bit more out of the system. We should also follow the practice of versioning the files nicely. Instead, we find a lot of jquery.js files with no version, that often have little tweaks added to the end of the fils, and caching is not setup well at all so the file keeps getting sent down for no reason.When I joined Google I realised that we could help out here. What if we hosted these files? Everyone would see some instant benefits: * Caching can be done correctly, and once, by us... and developers have to do nothing * Gzip works * We can serve minified versions * The files are hosted by Google which has a distributed CDN at various points around the world, so the files are "close" to the user * The servers are fast * By using the same URLs, if a critical mass of applications use the Google infrastructure, when someone comes to your application the file may already be loaded! * A subtle performance (and security) issue revolves around the headers that you send up and down. Since you are using a special domain (NOTE: not google.com!), no cookies or other verbose headers will be sent up, saving precious bytes.This is why we have released the AJAX Libraries API. We sat down with a few of the popular open source frameworks and they were all excited about the idea, so we got to work with them, and now you have access to their great work from our servers.
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/