Thanks to BrightMix for hosting the jQuery meetup presented by Jonathan Sharp last night in Omaha. Jonathan presented on the new features of jQuery 1.4 last night along other Q&A topics.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with the Google CDN for delivering jQuery and jQuery UI. The reasons behind using the CDN is faster library loads, cross-internet library caching, automatic version management, and decreased hosting bandwidth. Jonathan offered a few tips:

1. SSL works with the CDN’s path based requests. Use either “http://ajax.googleapis.com” or “https://ajax.googleapis.com”.
2. For automatic switching between http:// and https:// get rid of it. Yep – just use “//ajax.googleapis.com”. Don’t confuse the slashes as “\\” will get you a network path. This should also work for “<img src=’//…” and “<a href=’//…” but I haven’t tested that yet.
3. When using a path such as “//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.js”, you can control the automatic versioning by increasing or decreasing the dot notation on the version. In the example above, I will always get the latest version of 1.4 – currently 1.4.1. If I wanted to always get 1.4.0, I would append the “.1”. If I always wanted to get the laster 1.x version, I’d remove the “.4”.