Serving the jQuery library without using compression - AJAX

Google's Ajax Libraries API is a programming interface that permits web developers to download popular JavaScript packages, such as Prototype, jQuery and Scriptaculous, directly from Google’s servers instead of using local copies of these libraries. In this fourth part of a four-part series on using the API, you'll learn how to serve the jQuery framework without compression.

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By: Alejandro Gervasio

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January 26, 2009

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By using a similar approach to the example created in the previous section, it’s also feasible to serve, via the Google API, several JavaScript libraries without using compression. Of course, if you already grasped how to do this when using Prototype, then surely you won’t have major problems understanding how the same process can be performed with the jQuery package.

So it's time to move past theory and demonstrate with a functional code sample how to accomplish the aforementioned task. Thus, below I have rewritten the client-side part of the Ajax application built in the prior section, which this time uses the jQuery library. Here it is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<head>

<title>Reading file contents with jQuery library (uses Google API)</title>

body{

padding: 0;

margin: 0;

background: #fff;

}

h1{

font: bold 18pt Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

color: #000;

}

#filecontents{

width: 600px;

padding: 10px;

border: 1px solid #999;

font: normal 10pt Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

color: #000;

}

</style>

// load jQuery library with Google API (loads uncompressed source file)

google.load("jquery","1.2",{uncompressed:true});

google.setOnLoadCallback(function(){

$("#btn").click(function(){

$.get("read_file.php",function(fileContents){$("#filecontents").html(fileContents);});

});

</script>

</head>

<body>

<h1 id="header">Reading file contents with jQuery library (uses Google API)</h1>

</body>

</html>

That was pretty simple to read and grasp, wasn’t it? As shown above, now this sample Ajax application utilizes the jQuery library to fetch the contents of a text file in the web server. The most relevant thing to stress here is that this JavaScript package is downloaded in a completely uncompressed form, because it was specified in that way when calling the “google.load()” method.

Definitely, understanding how to serve the different libraries via the Google API without using compression is a no-brainer process that doesn’t require any further explanations. Therefore, in the final part of this tutorial I’ll be listing for you the complete source code corresponding to the Ajax program built earlier, so you can tweak and test it more easily.

Click on the following link and proceed to read the final section, please.

Next: Source code for the sample Ajax application >>