Question

I heard that some people where having problems accessing their sites which get their jQuery from Google since their corporate firewall didn’t like sites getting code from other sites, i.e. cross-site scripting?

Has anyone run into problem such as this?

Answer 1

One problem is that Google’s server can and do go down at the worst possible times. In my answer to the question ‘What was your most uncomfortable programming experience?‘, I answered:

I was demonstrating my team’s new web application to a group of potential users. I took a few minutes to talk about all the cool stuff the Google Visualization API can do, since we were using it heavily in our application. To demonstrate, I decided to graph a few sets of data we have collected previously. It was intended to convey the message: ‘Look how easy it is! Regular people can make good looking graphs using our product.’

As luck would have it, the Google servers that hosted the Javascript files necessary to use the Visualization API decided to stop working midway during my presentation. I sat in the chair, staring at the screen, mumbling to myself ‘but… but they’re Google… their servers can’t go down’. The team tried to laugh it off, but everyone realized at that moment how dangerous it can be to rely on any third party (even one as big as Google) when it really counts.

I know it seems unlikely, but unless you really have no other choice, I would recommend against hosting critical files on third-party servers, even if they are Google’s servers. Having customers complain about an outage is bad. Having customers complain about an outage that isn’t your fault and that you can’t solve is even worse.