What is the Best-Practice strategy on employing a single jQuery library (and version) with RF?

[feder]

When using jquery functions on my J2EE websites, I often end up employing 2 jQuery libraries. This is a consequence of having jQuery functions invoked on pages, which do NOT use a Richfaces tag. Thus I need to import the jQuery library sepraratly. As soon as I request a page with RF tags, the RF-provided jQuery lib is loaded into the browser, too. Since I'm not depending on specific jQuery version (e.g. the very latest), it makes no sense to maintain and load 2 jQuery libs at the time.

What is the best-practices strategy of the RF developers in such cases? How can you enforce the RF-provided jQuery lib to be loaded every single time, regardless wheather a RF tag is used.

I'm using RichFaces 4.3.3

Curious about a consise discussion. Thanks.

feder

[bleathem]

In RichFaces 4.3 you would use:

<h:outputScript name="jquery.js" />

[feder]

Brian,

Just to get this straigt for me and others:

1. <h:outputScript name="jquery.js" /> should be the path to the RF jquery, right?
2. RF will NOT output another script tag with jquery.js into the head tag, when using <h:outputScript name="jquery.js" /> and the user requests a page which includes a a4j or rich tag?

Can these questions be answered with yes?

Thanks for the clarification,

Feder

[bleathem]

1. <h:outputScript name="jquery.js" /> should be the path to the RF jquery, right?

No.  h:outputScript uses the JSF resource library/name syntax.  The above is telling JSF to output the script named "jquery.js" in the library "" as bundled in the RichFaces jar.  (In RichFaces 4.5/5 we are moving this script into a non-empty library).

2. RF will NOT output another script tag with jquery.js into the head tag, when using <h:outputScript name="jquery.js" /> and the user requests a page which includes a a4j or rich tag?

Correct.  JSF resources are included only once on a page.  This is why I recommend using the h:outputScript tag, rather than linking the file directly.