Release: Autocomplete Plugin 1.0

I’ve started this autocomplete plugin in fall 2006, picking up the great work from Dylan Verheul, Dan G. Switzer and Anjesh Tuladhar. Dylan provided the initial implementation which got improved by Dan. Anjesh added support for completing multiple values within one field, similar to GMail’s to-field. I’ve merged these efforts, refactoring a lot of code, trying to improve the API and adding a distinct set of features. Most notably is the scrolling support via mouse (scrollbar, mousewheel) and keyboard (key up/down, page up/down). That together with Dylan’s great caching solution sets this plugin apart from the numerous autocomplete solutions available these days.

Since then a lot of people already used the development releases and provided a lot of feedback. Dan contributed a ton of stuff, kudos to him!

A bit of praise from the plugin page comments, here from Rino Salvatore Sassi:

Jörn, thanks a lot for your work.
my problem *was*:
a user writes some letters of a name in an input box; ajax goes into a database, picks the matching surnames, emails, phones…, and lists them as:
name surname – email
the user picks one row from the list and then the input boxes such as surname, email, phone are filled with the corresponding data.

i was going mad.
with your scripts i’ve done it in minutes.
thanks, again.

Direct links to get started:
Download
Demos
Documentation

This 1.0 release marks the first of many more to come. On the roadmap are a lot of detail enhancements and various edge-case issues. In addition more complex usecases, that today need a lot of setup, will be made easier.

PS: Please post support requests to the jQuery discussion list instead.

-Jörn

No more comments.
  1. Thanks for the praise, it’s very satisfying to see that so many people have enjoyed my initial work, and that everybody’s improvements have led to this official jQuery implementation. I encourage everybody to use this version rather than the original, since it’s better for the community to focus on a single (supported) implementation.