Best way to use Google's hosted jQuery, but fall back to my hosted library on Google fail

You can achieve it like this:

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js"></script>

<script>
       window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="/path/to/your/jquery"><\/script>');
</script>

This should be in your page's <head> and any jQuery ready event handlers should be in the <body> to avoid errors (although it's not fool-proof!).

One more reason to not use Google-hosted jQuery is that in some countries, Google's domain name is banned.


The easiest and cleanest way to do this by far:

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

This seems to work for me:

<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// has the google object loaded?
if (window.google && window.google.load) {
    google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");
} else {
    document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://joecrawford.com/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"><\/script>');
}
window.onload = function() {
    $('#test').css({'border':'2px solid #f00'});
};
</script>
</head>
<body>
    <p id="test">hello jQuery</p>
</body>
</html>

The way it works is to use the google object that calling http://www.google.com/jsapi loads onto the window object. If that object is not present, we are assuming that access to Google is failing. If that is the case, we load a local copy using document.write. (I'm using my own server in this case, please use your own for testing this).

I also test for the presence of window.google.load - I could also do a typeof check to see that things are objects or functions as appropriate. But I think this does the trick.

Here's just the loading logic, since code highlighting seems to fail since I posted the whole HTML page I was testing:

if (window.google && window.google.load) {
    google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");
} else {
    document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://joecrawford.com/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"><\/script>');
}

Though I must say, I'm not sure that if this is a concern for your site visitors you should be fiddling with the Google AJAX Libraries API at all.

Fun fact: I tried initially to use a try..catch block for this in various versions but could not find a combination that was as clean as this. I'd be interested to see other implementations of this idea, purely as an exercise.

Tags:

Jquery

Google Ajax Libraries

Cdn

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