Google have finally launched a much anticipated service among web developers. Use of various AJAX API libraries has become pretty ubiquitous in newer websites and unfortunately it’s getting to a point that every other page you visit makes you download yet another copy of Prototype, Mootools or jQuery wasting large amounts of bandwidth if only you could access the already cached copies that the user has already downloaded.

Google has stepped in as a trusted source of central hosting for these AJAX libraries with Google AJAX Libraries API. This has been tried before but with a name as large as Google behind it, it has every chance of actually making an impact. Google will host major releases of:

• jQuery
• prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• dojo

Hopefully this will help speed up access times, lower bandwidth bills (which with some of these libraries can be quite significant amounts of bandwidth) and help lessen problems with outdated, buggy, copies of libraries.