Mar/102
jQuery / Java / Autocomplete
If you haven’t heard of jQuery, its a Javascript library that allows you to implement AJAX functionality in your web pages. You can find out more about it from the jQuery website.
My first attempt with jQuery involved using an autocomplete plugin provided by Pengoworks. Autocomplete is where you start typing in a few letters and the text box will come up with some suggestions. There was a tutorial for this present on the jquery autocomplete page, but it didn’t quite meet my needs, and maybe it doesn’t meet yours.
There are two ways in which to use the auto complete functionality. If there are a few options (ie upto 50) the list of suggestions can be embedded in the web page itself, but if there are many options (1000s) the suggestions need to come back from a server. It was this second process that the tutorial did not cover, and hence the reason for providing a step by step guide to doing it here.
In partcular, I’m working from Java in Netbeans 6.8.