CDN stands for content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) which is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve the content (like jQuery library and other open source libraries) to end-users with high availability and high performance.
There are three popular CDN – Google, Microsoft and jQuery.
// Google CDN <scripttype="text/javascript"src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js"></script> // Microsoft CDN <scripttype="text/javascript"src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.9.1.min.js"></script> // JQuery CDN <scripttype="text/javascript"src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.min.js"></script>
Advantages
- It reduces the load from your application server.
- It saves bandwidth since jQuery and other open libraries/framework will load faster from these CDN.
- The most important benefit is it will be cached means if a user has visited any site which is using jQuery framework from any of these CDN and your web application is also using the same CDN for serving the jQuery then for your application, it will not request the jQuery from CDN.