Google hosted javascript libraries

Google have recently announced they are hosting popular open source javascript libraries for everyone to use in their projects.

My first thoughts were, “Awesome, they can suck up my bandwidth charges and I can have fast access to javascript libraries”, but now I’ve thought about it a bit more I’m even keener.

Before I get carried away I’ve read a few negatives, the biggest being “Google will be able to track your site”, and to that I say “I use Google Analytics and Adsense, they do it already”!

The bigger implications for me are this – if everybody loads their core javascript files from the same place, then they will be cached on every site that uses them, speeding things up across the web. This would be fantastic for everyone, the only issue now is convincing people to use the libraries on the Google site.

Whilst I am a fan of jQuery, there are loads of javascript libraries out there, and Google supports all the big ones. At the time of writing this you can get jQuery, prototype, script.aculo.us, MooTools, and dojo. That’s something for everyone right there.

Now I just need to make use of them. As I mentioned above, jQuery is my language of choice and my plan is to use it more and more on my future websites, and to replace existing code on my current ones.