JavaScript: How to download JS asynchronously?

Question

On my web site, I'm trying to accomplishes the fastest page load as possible.

I've noticed that it appears my JavaScript are not loading asynchronously. Picture linked below.

How my web site works is that it needs to load two external JavaScript files:

• Google Maps v3 JavaScript, and
• JQuery JavaScript

Then, I have inline JavaScript within the HTML that cannot be executed until those two files above are downloaded.

Once it loads these external javascript files, it then, and only then, can dynamically render the page. The reason why my page can't load until both Google Maps and JQuery are loaded is that - my page, based on the geolocation (using Gmaps) of the user will then display the page based on where they are located (e.g. New York, San Francisco, etc). Meaning, two people in different cities viewing my site will see different frontpages.

Question: How can I get my JavaScript files to download asynchronously so that my overall page load time is quickest?

UPDATE:

If I were to download, somehow, Google-maps and JQuery asynchronously, how would I create an event that would be fired once both Google-maps and JQuery have downloaded since my page has a hard dependency on those files to execute.

UPDATE 2

Even though there are 3 answers below, none still actually answer the problem I have. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

HTTP downloads are generally limited by browsers to two simultaneous downloads per domain. This is why some sites have the dynamic content on www.domain.tla and the images and javascript on static.domain.tla.

But browsers act slightly differently with scripts, while a script is downloading, however, the browser won't start any other downloads, even on different hostnames.

The standard solution is to move scripts to the bottom of the page, but there is a workaround that might or might not work for you: Insert the script DOM element using Javascript.

Answer 2

Regardless what order they download in, the scripts should be parsed/executed in the order in which they occur on the page (unless you use DEFER).

So, you can put both Google Maps first in the head, THEN JQuery. Then, in the body of your page somewhere:

<script language="Javascript">

    function InitPage() {
       // Do stuff that relies on JQuery and Google, since this script should
       // not execute until both have already loaded.
       }

    $(InitPage);   // this won't execute until JQuery is ready

</script>

But this does have the disadvantage of blocking your other connections while loading the beginning of the page, which isn't so awesome for page performance.

Instead, you can keep JQuery in the HEAD, but load the Google scripts from the InitPage() function, using JQuery's Javascript-loading functionality rather than the Google JSAPI. Then start your rendering when that call-back function executes. Same as the above, but with this InitPage() function instead:

  function InitPage() {
     $.getScript('Google Maps Javascript URL', function() {
        // Safe to start rendering now
        });

Answer 3

You could use something like this, which works pretty well in most browsers. It has some issues in IE6 at least, but I don't really have the time to investigate them.

var require = function (scripts, loadCallback) {
    var length        = scripts.length;
    var first         = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];
    var parentNode    = first.parentNode;
    var loadedScripts = 0;
    var script;

    for (var i=0; i<length; i++) {
        script = document.createElement("script");
        script.async = true;
        script.type = "text/javascript";
        script.src = scripts[i];

        script.onload = function () {
            loadedScripts++;

            if (loadedScripts === length) {
                loadCallback();
            }
        };

        script.onreadystatechange = function () {
            if (script.readyState === "complete") {
                loadedScripts++;

                if (loadedScripts === length) {
                    loadCallback();
                }
            }
        };

        parentNode.insertBefore(script, first);
    }
};

require([
    "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js",
    "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.1.0/prototype.js",
    "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.7.0/build/yuiloader/yuiloader-min.js"
], function () {
    console.log(jQuery);
    console.log($);
    console.log(YAHOO);
});

Answer 4

Hi. Someone asked me to comment on this thread, but that was before @lonut posted a response. @lonut's code is a very good solution, but I have some comments (critical and not so critical):

First, @lonut's code assumes that the scripts do NOT have load dependencies on the other scripts. This is a little hard to explain, so let's work with the simple example of jquery.min.js and prototype.js. Suppose we have a simple page that just loads these two scripts like this:

<script src="jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="prototype.js"></script>

Remember - there's nothing else in the page - no other JavaScript code. If you load that page the two scripts get downloaded and everything's fine. Now, what happens if you remove the jquery.min.js script? If you get errors from prototype.js because it's trying to reference symbols defined in jquery.min.js, then prototype.js has a load dependency on jquery.min.js - you cannot load prototype.js unless jquery.min.js has already been loaded. If, however, you don't get any errors, then the two scripts can be loaded in any order you wish. Assuming you have no load dependencies between your external scripts, @lonut's code is great. If you do have load dependencies - it gets very hard and you should read Chapter 4 in Even Faster Web Sites.

Second, one problem with @lonut's code is some versions of Opera will call loadCallback twice (once from the onload handler and a second time from the onreadystatechange handler). Just add a flag to make sure loadCallback is only called once.

Third, most browsers today open more than 2 connections per hostname. See Roundup on Parallel Connections.

Answer 5

The LABjs dynamic script loader is designed specifically for this type of case. For instance, you might do:

$LAB
  .script("googlemaps.js")
  .script("jquery.js")
  .wait(function(){
     // yay, both googlemaps and jquery have been loaded, so do something!
  });

If the situation was a little more complex, and you had some scripts that had dependencies on each other, as Steve Souders has mentioned, then you might do:

$LAB
  .script("jquery.js")
  .wait() // make sure jquery is executed first
  .script("plugin.jquery.js")
  .script("googlemaps.js")
  .wait(function(){
     // all scripts are ready to go!
  });

In either case, LABjs will download all of the scripts ("jquery.js", "googlemaps.js", and "plugin.jquery.js") in parallel, as least up to the point the browser will allow. But by judicious use of the .wait() in the chain, LABjs will make sure they execute in the proper order. That is, if there's no .wait() in between the two scripts in the chain, they will each execute ASAP (meaning indeterminate order between tehm). If there's a .wait() in between two scripts in the chain, then the first script will execute before the second script, even though they loaded in parallel.

Answer 6

Move your javascript includes (<script src="...) from the HEAD element to the end of your BODY element. Generally whatever is placed in the HEAD is loaded synchronously, whatever is placed in the BODY is loaded asynchronously. This is more or less true for script includes, however most browsers these days block everything below the script until it is loaded - hence why having scripts included at the bottom of the body is best practice.

Here is the YUI guildline for this which explains it in further detail: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/07/high_performanc_5.html

This is also the reason why stylesheets should be in the head, and javascript should be in the body. As we do not want to see our page turn from spaghetti to niceness while the styles load asynchronously, and we don't want to wait on our javascript while our page loads.