JavaScript::Autocomplete::Backend 0.10

JavaScript::Autocomplete::Backend is a Google Suggest-compatible autocompletion backend.

SYNOPSYS

package MyAutocompleter;
use base qw(JavaScript::Autocomplete::Backend);

my @NAMES = qw(alice bob charlie);
sub expand {
my ($self, $query) = @_;
# do something to expand the query
my $re = qr/^Q$queryE/i;
my @names = grep /$re/, @NAMES;
(lc $query, @names, [], [""]);
}

MyAutocompleter->run;

This is a base class for implementing an autocompletion server with the same protocol used by Google Suggest ( http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en ). It is basically a CGI script that takes a word to be completed as the "qu" parameter and returns a specially concoted JavaScript statement. For more efficiency it should be possible to turn it into a mod_perl handler; that is left as an exercise for the reader.

The front-end JavaScript code is discussed in http://serversideguy.blogspot.com/2004/12/google-suggest-dissected.html .
This module is used by creating a subclass, which should override the expand method, which takes care of searching for the autocompletion results.