Comments on: Announcing AJAX Libraries API: Speed up your Ajax apps with Google’s infrastructure

By: thestreamssstone

thestreamssstone — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:36:36 +0000

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. That is the point.

By: royalinternationalpackersmover

royalinternationalpackersmover — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:48:13 +0000

Nice, this article is very helpful for us.

By: josephanderson

josephanderson — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:40:21 +0000

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

By: alex559

alex559 — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:51:23 +0000

Hey i was waiting for a post like this , very useful.

By: masini

masini — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:43:25 +0000

is very interesting what you say there must be knowledge but a little more advanced. I am not so good.

By: BillyHoffman

BillyHoffman — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:49:11 +0000

Actually using Google’s AJAX Library API (or any JavaScript Library CDN from Yahoo or Microsoft) is slower right now than just serving the files locally except in extreme cases. Its the Network effort. This is only valuable if lots of other people are doing it too. Otherwise nothing gets cached. I did some research and found tat the market penetration for these JavaScript Library CDNs isn’t enough to make it worth the cost of contacting a wrd party.

By: Bet365

Bet365 — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:38:29 +0000

google is starting to be a very important part in our lifes. As a matter of fact, some of us could not live without the big G. By launchig services like this one Google assure’s us that the continuos spreading is far from finish.

By: aarthi123

aarthi123 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:31:12 +0000

Good review…… Thanks for posting…….. I was searching this kind of projects…… Good work man….

By: pariuri

pariuri — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 05:28:51 +0000

It looks like a very promising project, good luck with your work and keep us all informed on its progress and how its use has benefited small community groups.

By: GlobalFreelanceProjects

GlobalFreelanceProjects — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:43:32 +0000

This article is very good for developers.

Thanks for this article

By: Tribulus

Tribulus — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:14:37 +0000

Wont the DNS be be on auto for this to happen?

By: MattFoster

MattFoster — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:28:54 +0000

This boasts a better ability to cache across web servers. Even if you have a very well equipped caching system etc. The idea would be that if the user had come from another site, loading the same framework, from Google’s URL, and you make a request to the same URL, you’re able to then just have the user load from their cache instead of saying “No use my version from x.com instead of y.com, even though the file is identical”

–
Matt Foster
Ajax Engineer
Nth Penguin, LLC
http://www.nthpenguin.com

By: Mukul

Mukul — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:50:15 +0000

Just posted my thoughts on “Web Service for Content Distribution Network” – http://tinyurl.com/6y3gqx . Would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks,
Mukul.
http://mukulblog.blogspot.com

By: Bowser

Bowser — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:30:48 +0000

@robnyman

I can see your point about making assumptions about it being frictionless.
But can you (or anyone else) tell me something… it seems to me that the real value of this idea is not in relying on Google to do the proper gzipping and hosting of the files, but rather the files will have a much higher chance of staying cached (especially if a critical mass is reached) if they’re all pointing to a SINGLE location, no?

Or, I can rephrase the question: if I host “mootools1.11.js” on my site, and an identical version exists on the client’s computer, it won’t be cached because the file is specific to my domain, correct? This is the problem that Google’s solution offers an answer for.

By: blueclock

blueclock — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:42:05 +0000

Regarding the critical mass… is anyone using this yet?

Are any big players using it?

By: Aphrodisiac

Aphrodisiac — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:57:43 +0000

Cheers that was very helpful

By: robnyman

robnyman — Thu, 29 May 2008 23:12:12 +0000

@JeromeLapointe,

I basically agree with what you are saying. What I meant was that, yes, many people will disregard from learning or looking into how they themselves can cache, gzip and compress files on their own, and other types of files than JavaScript, since it’s just offered to them now.

If they instead, as you suggest, look at how Google do it and learn from it, great! I’m just skeptical, though, after having worked as a consultant for about a decade now, having seen how numerous customers work. I think it’s as important to educate web developers and spread the word, and not just offer hosting for certain JavaScript libraries, added and judged only by the Google gods (they should add many more JavaScript libraries to begin with, such as base 2 etc, and also add some sort of “suggest this code” feature).

While frameworks, WYSIWYG tools etc have their place, they are also, more often than not, part of creating something decent in a short amount of time, but not really optimal (since no code can foresee any type of possible context it will be used in).

And sure, files will be cached, but for those who aren’t, there’s still the DNS risk, and looking at how some web sites perform with Goggle Analytics and Google AdSense scripts, I’m just not sure that it will always be completely friction-less.

So, at the end of day, this might be a great solution for some, but for now my doubts linger in relation to factors such as people not learning proper set-ups, DNS dependencies and a too small JavaScript library subset on offer.

By: JeromeLapointe

JeromeLapointe — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:25:00 +0000

…or
http://ajax.domassistant.com/ajax/libs/domassistant/2.7.1.1/domassistant.js

By: JeromeLapointe

JeromeLapointe — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:17:01 +0000

@Robnyman
“It is a very valid concern, in my world at least, that most people will completely avoid learning how to serve code the best way and just rely on Google, and that Google gets to decide what code will be offered to such a massive market of web developers.”
It’s a bit like saying let’s not create helpers, frameworks, wysiwyg editors… people will rely on them and become less skilled…

If someone could not cache things properly before what makes you think they were about to start caching things properly ever… If they were not compressing their files… you’re saying now that google will compress one or two that they will host for them… they will never compress the rest of their files?

Odds are being in contact with “the correct way of doing things” will inspire more people (or maybe just inform them that its even possible to do) than otherwise.

But for those who don’t care and will do things the crappy way and would have continued doing so no matter what… you are right… now that it’s all done for them… they will continue to do things the crappy way no matter what…
I don’t see what the point is though.

Yes, now you make an extra DNS lookup and possibly additional HTTP requests if you had a bundling solution.. but only if the file is not cached.
For libraries with version sensitive URL… the lifespan of a file in the cache can be very long… in theory it should never change.

With browsers using these URIs as references to factory loaded libraries… there’s no reason you could not have a system that recognizes links to:
http://ajax.yahooapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js
as much as
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js
or
http://mysite.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js

By: bclaydon

bclaydon — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:10:50 +0000

I agree this is a good start but I feel the url version references are a little too flexible, Dion and will invariably negate some of the intended caching benefits.

Personally I’d rather see an HTTP RFC addition of file checksum/hashes to be ref’d against cached files based simply on version-less names, etc. But that’s just me.

And I’m not entirely sure I agree with Dean’s concern over stifling development (one of the few apparently).