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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T21:48:55+00:00

In my grails app, we use jquery. I include jquery on the necessary pages

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In my grails app, we use jquery. I include jquery on the necessary pages with

<g:javascript library="jquery"/>

If we decide to change javascript libraries, I need to update every page. I know I can include this in the layout, but the library is not needed on every page, so that seems wasteful.

Is there a typical way in grails to specify in one place what the default javascript library should be and then to just include that default one without specifying that it is jquery (or whatever it is) on every page?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since most browsers heavily cache things like JavaScript libraries, putting the library include into the layout is probably better than putting it in each individual page. The heavy caching that browsers do means that users will only load the library from the server once for your whole site (or at least their browsing session), and by having it be handled in the layout you are drastically reducing your maintenance load (which you alluded to)

    In general, your JavaScript libraries should be highly cached, and in many cases it’s preferable to pull them from a highly used CDN, like Google’s. Your “local” (ie. from your server) library should only get requested if the CDN provider goes down and the browser can’t get to their library. (Take a look at the HTML5Boilerplate project for how this is done)

    Because of that, I wouldn’t worry about the very minimal performance hit that putting the library into the layout page would incur. Even if you don’t use a well-used CDN for your library, any browser that people actually use today will only load your JavaScript library once (the first page it gets that includes it) and will simply use it’s cached copy for the rest of the pages on your site.

    So, in a nutshell, put it in the layout page and don’t worry about it. It will only be requested on the first page load, and will come from the cache for all subsequent loads, and your codebase will be DRYer.

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