Apache server-side files caching via .htaccess?

Question

Hi,

1. I'm starting new website and gonna include several JS libs and would like to know how .htaccess file template should look like with caching of media and JS files on?

2. Whats better for compression, GZip or Deflate?

3. Is it better/faster solution to serve those JS libs off the Google CDN perhaps then locally?

I'm asking CDN question since some of scripts served off GoogleCDN are potentially going to update and eventually break the website layout so i thought it would be better for me to host them locally and cache via webserver if its going to work with same/near-same speed.