There are many decisions involved when using new technologies and new products. Many people will often go for open source software because it’s free and you can modify the code. To me being “an open source” project involves a whole lot more than simply having an opened code base that you can modify and use for free, but it also involves a large amount of factors as such as technical documentation, user examples, tools for a software, the community based around a project and the likes of actual response time from developers.

This article is a major Kudos to the CouchDB developers. In particular I would like to thank Jan Lehnardt, Paul J. Davis and Robert Newson from the CouchDB fame. Let me explain why…

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A number of people have asked me over the past few days how should one go about using jQuery Autocomplete but instead of using newline delimiters, with a URL that returns JSON data.

At first, I first had a hack that involved handling the “keyup” event myself then sending a request to a JSON URL, and then involve the “autocompleteArray” method from Autocomplete. It was a mess considering that the autocomplete method is already sending the value of your defined input to the server as a GET parameter. I was repeating the behavior of the function in order to receive a simple JSON array. I was unhappy, and felt it to be a very annoying solution because I wanted to take advantage of the internal caching system of jQuery Autocomplete.

So I decided to give a look at the code and came up with a much cleaner solution. I directly added a JSON option to the Autocomplete. So for anyone interested you can find the patch here: jQuery Autocomplete JSON patch.

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