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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Watch out! The semantic web is on the way, a thought that many (and not just the marketeers) may find daunting . Why? Because system and web app developers that want to take advantage of the semantic web will need to learn a lot of new standards and change the way they work.

I have been studying and working with web standards (XHTML, RDF, ATOM, RSS) for well over 4 years now, something I am glad of,  because recently something struck me. Conventions are arising, for example DOAP, SKOS and others, that are built on top of the Resource Description Framework otherwise known as RDF, if they aren’t, they are usually built on something very similar or related. (more…)