Exercise Explanations: Implementing AJAX Suggest and Autocomplete

This is the AJAX Autocomplete application you create in Chapter 6 of AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications.

In this exercise we develop an AJAX suggest and autocomplete feature that helps the user to find PHP functions and their official help page from http://www.php.net. The PHP functions database required for this chapter includes all the PHP functions from http://www.php.net/quickref.php.

We implement the following features in our application:

• The matching functions are retrieved as you type and displayed in a scrollable drop-down list.
• The current keyword is autocompleted with the missing letters from the first suggestion returned as result. The added letters are highlighted.
• The initial letters matching the search keyword are bolded in the drop-down list.
• The drop-down list is scrollable, but the scroll bar appears only if the list of results exceeds a predefined number of suggestions.

The complete AJAX and PHP tutorial features even more AJAX web development examples.