Today for Wijmo Wednesday, we’re going to talk about CDNs or Content Delivery Networks. There are two ways to deploy “content” for your website to your users. Content being images, CSS, JavaScript, etc. First, there is the approach of hosting it yourself. This is perfectly acceptable, and many developers choose to take this route because they need full control over their environments. This approach is also useful during development. By having the files local, you can continue to develop while offline. With a CDN, you’re required to have internet access to access the source code. The downside is that you’re required to deploy and maintain the code yourself. Standard web deployment concepts such as compression and minification are left up to you to do. Second, there is use of a CDN for deployment. A CDN is a network of computers around the world that host content. Ideally, if you’re in the United States and you access a webpage using a CDN, you’ll get your content from a server based in the US. If you’re in India or China, and you access the SAME webpage, the content will come from a server a little closer to your location. When web browsers load content, they commonly will check to see if they already have a copy of the file cached. By using a CDN, you can benefit from this. If a user had previously visited a site using the same CDN, they will already have a cached version of the files on their machine. Your page will load quicker since they don’t need to re-download your support content. Wijmo has had CDN support from the very beginning. If you head over the CDN page (heck, the v2 beta is also on CDN), you’ll see the markup required for loading Wijmo into your page. If you’re starting a new project, use the Wijmo CDN to quickly prototype. I do this all the time. Later, as you get deeper into development, download the files locally or use NuGet. There you go! CDN makes it quick and easy to use external libraries, and deploy them to your users. Go forth and be awesome. Kevin Griffin KevinG@ComponentOne.com Follow Me On Twitter
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