Comment Re:Only a partial solution (Score 3, Informative) 285
AJAX systems are modular - at least some of them are somewhat. Scriptaculous, for example, can be loaded with with only certain functions.
"With Google hosting everything," you get to use exactly the version you want - google.load('jquery', '1.2.3') or google.load('jquery', '1.2'), which will get you the highest version '1'.2 available - currently 1.2.6. Furthermore, you can still load your own custom code or modifications after the fact.
For those concerned about privacy: yes they keep stats - they even do some of it client side - after libraries are loaded, a call is made to http://www.google.com/uds/stats with a list of which libraries you loaded. However, the loader is also the same exact loader you would use if you were using other Google JavaScript APIs anyways. It started out as a way to load the Search API and the Maps API: google.load('maps', '2') and/or google.load('search', '1').
Google's claim to providing good distributed hosting of compressed and cachable versions of the libraries aside, the loader does a few useful things in its own right. It deals with versioning, letting you decide to which granularity of versions you want to load, and letting them deal with updates. Also, it deals with setting up a callback function that actually works after the DOM is loaded in IE, Safari, Opera, and Firefox, and after the entire page is load for any other browesers. They also provide convenience functions. google_exportSymbol will let you write your code in a non-global scope, and then put the 'public' interfaces into the global scope.
Finally, you can inject your own libraries into their loader. After the jsapi script tag, include your own, set google.loader.googleApisBase to point to your own server, and call google.loader.rpl with a bit of JSON defining your libraries' names, locations, and versions. Subsequent calls to google.load('mylib', 'version') will work as expected.
"With Google hosting everything," you get to use exactly the version you want - google.load('jquery', '1.2.3') or google.load('jquery', '1.2'), which will get you the highest version '1'.2 available - currently 1.2.6. Furthermore, you can still load your own custom code or modifications after the fact.
For those concerned about privacy: yes they keep stats - they even do some of it client side - after libraries are loaded, a call is made to http://www.google.com/uds/stats with a list of which libraries you loaded. However, the loader is also the same exact loader you would use if you were using other Google JavaScript APIs anyways. It started out as a way to load the Search API and the Maps API: google.load('maps', '2') and/or google.load('search', '1').
Google's claim to providing good distributed hosting of compressed and cachable versions of the libraries aside, the loader does a few useful things in its own right. It deals with versioning, letting you decide to which granularity of versions you want to load, and letting them deal with updates. Also, it deals with setting up a callback function that actually works after the DOM is loaded in IE, Safari, Opera, and Firefox, and after the entire page is load for any other browesers. They also provide convenience functions. google_exportSymbol will let you write your code in a non-global scope, and then put the 'public' interfaces into the global scope.
Finally, you can inject your own libraries into their loader. After the jsapi script tag, include your own, set google.loader.googleApisBase to point to your own server, and call google.loader.rpl with a bit of JSON defining your libraries' names, locations, and versions. Subsequent calls to google.load('mylib', 'version') will work as expected.
