One of the most important tools that we have access to as web developers are open source javascript frameworks and toolkits.  You know, tools like jQuery, prototype, dojo, scriptaculous.

I think you are a lot like me in that you always find it a real inconvenience to always go out and download the latest source, bring it into your development project, and include it in all of your files.  I ALWAYS have different projects using different versions of prototype!

You probably also hate that it takes forever to load all of these toolkits in your webpages.  They are so useful, you can't really design without them, but they increase your page load time a lot.

Well, there are others like you out there, and a good thing that some of them work at google.

Google AJAX Libraries API has approached these problems by hosting these open source javascript libraries and wrapping an interface around them to be able to load the most current version, or even a specific version in the past.  All without actually including any source code locally.  No more storing released versions of prototype in SVN.

This also has the potential to make loading the various javascript libraries take no time!  Let me explain.  The more people that start usin the API, the better chance you have that the javascript library you are using is already in the cache!  You know there are tons of others out there using those tools, why not use that to your advantage and save some page load time.

So you may be wondering if this is hard to use.  Not at all.  Simply include the Google AJAX Libraries API source file, and use google.load.  Here is an example.

  <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
  <script>
    // Load jQuery
    google.load("jquery", "1");
  </script>

I really think Google is on to something here and I hope it catches on!