Building AutoComplete Inputs with PHP, PEAR, Dojo and YUI

Ever since the big search engines added auto-suggest, hardly a week goes by without a client asking me to build similar autocomplete functionality into a Web form. Fortunately, modern programming toolkits like Dojo provide ready-made widgets that have the necessary client-side functions for autocomplete. Add a little bit of server-side glue, in the form of a PHP script that talks to a database to generate valid suggestions, and enabling this functionality in a Web application now becomes a matter of hours, rather than days. In this article, I’ll show you how to do this using three different libraries: PEAR HTML_QuickForm, YUI, and Dojo. Come on in, and find out more!