Jquery.com was down | Hacker News Reader

Jquery.com was down

jquery.com

14 pointsbinarydreams12 comments

Possibly a good time for a reminder, folks: It's worth checking that if you're hotlinking to jQuery, it's the Google Hosted Libraries version.[1]

It looks like code.jquery.com survived whatever the present situation is (otherwise a big chunk of the 'net would be finding out right about now), but it's been made clear for a while [2] that use of the code.jquery.com/* URLs isn't encouraged.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide#jquer...

[2]: http://blog.jquery.com/2009/08/20/codejquerycom-redirected-t...

Or, much better, have a local fallback:

    <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="/js/libs/jquery.1.7.2.min.js"><\/script>')</script>

Yep, should have mentioned this, definitely a sensible idea - I believe this specific snippet is taken from HTML5 boilerplate. Google is blocked in some countries!

I didn't know a fallback could be so simple. Thank you x 3 (the number of scripts I remotely load)

This is especially valid as the Google server sends a far-future expires header (see below), so as soon as the browser has the file in its cache it won't even try to contact the Google server for a new version of the file.

So even if Google's servers go down, the browser will still use its locally available file (even without a possible delay, when waiting for a timeout).

  $ curl -I ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  [...]
  Expires: Sat, 07 Dec 2013 05:29:17 GMT
  [...]

Site's down, directing HN front page traffic at it will help bring it back

Exactly.

The main site is down, however the code library (http://code.jquery.com/) remains operational.

Oh no! The apocalypse here!

Not being a web-dev guy i've never really understood why people insisted in including libraries from 3rd-party website..

Ok, i get that you might have a cache hit for a visitor that has visited a site with that exact same resource included before, but other than that, what am i missing?

Compared to events such as this, i'd rather host it myself and when i'm down, nobody cares because i'm down anyways..

There are benefits to use a CDN, or one of the Google API hosting services. But yes, linking to a copy right on the jquery site, can't be encouraged.

There are so many reasons not to do this. The potential site reliability risk of relying on someone else's free CDN (page not loading/loading slowly) far outweighs the slight benefit of CDN acceleration. When you CloudFront/Akamai your content, you have some sort of SLA, but don't complain when Google pull shared library hosting as they have many other free services.

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