As the performance rules suggest, common Javascript libraries like JQuery or YUI should be served from CDNs. Though the advice is great for production systems, it makes web development without connectivity hard.
Alternatives
- To circumvent the fact that a developer may not always have access to the internet and hence the CDN, some web pages include a second script that check for the absence of the global object and then include it from the local filesystem. In my humble opinion, this method is a little ugly and adds unnecessary extra logic.
- Another common alternative is to include the final paths of the when the pages are built using ant or make. Web development is usually about making a change and hitting F5, building every time to see a change is hard.
- The most common approach I have seen is to alter the /etc/hosts file (or a dedicated proxy server in the middle) that intercepts requests to redirect them to the local file.
I noticed that I usually have Tamper Data or Fiddler open when I do web development to inspect traffic to my server. Instead of modifying the hosts file or spinning up a special proxy server, it is easier to add rules to Fiddler that redirect CDN requests to a local file.
All that we need to do is start fiddler and filter all requests to internet resources and then save the session to import it as auto-responder.
An easier approach that would work for all applications would be to save the entire CDN archive as a .saz file. Unfortunately, I could not find the entire list of Google or Microsoft CDN files.
I tried setting up a crawler that picks up all versions and files/sub-files for all libraries from Google, but then, I just worry about just 2 or 3 libraries. Hence, it is easier to set up mapping rules just for them.
Next Steps
I am planning to write a Fiddler or a Firefox plugin that automatically looks at CDN requests, caches them, and makes them available in case of absence of connectivity.
