UPDATE: Well, the first ding occurred quickly: ReinH’s lightweight version doesn’t work (for me) on IE7/Vista. A couple others have noted it as well. Moving on to Dylan’s version next.
I’ve been searching around for different autocomplete plugins for JQuery. I’ve found four leading contenders:
| Pengoworks | 14K |
| Dylan Verheul | 14K |
| Jörn Zaefferer | 27K |
| ReinH | 3K |
It appears that Jörn’s version is the Swiss Army Knife of autocompleters – you can even show images. Pretty cool. But is it worth 27K if I’m not using that functionality?
What I’ll probably do is start with the 3K version until it proves itself too limited (if it ever does). Let’s follow the XP principle of “do the simplest thing that could possibly work.”
The Pursuit of a Life 
A few things to consider: My plugin is based on the Pengowork’s one, which was based on Dylan’s implementation. In other words, all three have the same subset of features, with mine being most likely the most complete and stable.
The size should be compared ignoring comments and whitespace: The minified version is about 12k, the packed about 7. As usual, minified + gzip is recommended, which should get it below 7k. I’ve just commited updated versions of both minified and packed versions, so you don’t have to worry about that.
ReinH’s version was written from scratch, with a complete different architecture, relying heavily on custom events to keep the core light. I’ve talked with Yehuda Katz, who actually wrote most of the code, about collaboration – so far I’m simply lacking the time to actually do something about it.
Nonetheless, its still on my horizont 🙂
Just curious about the IE bugs that you ran across with ReinH/Yehuda’s version. I ran into a couple problems with it myself but dealt with them. I might have fixed the problems you ran across. My updates are up on github:
http://github.com/istruble/jquery-autocomplete/commit/bdc926bd2c18c3ebab4e31463a8ae899fd761316
If you did not run into the same bugs you should post a bug report for it.
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jq-autocomplete
Joern – I dig your plugin for how all encompassing it is and would love to see what happens if you rework it with some of the custom event driven ideas found in jq-autocomplete.
First I’ve tested Pengoworks script but it was not behaving exactly the way I wanted it. Then I checked Zaefferers one, all I had to do was replacing the js and css files with the new ones and everything was looking the way I wanted it…
1: You can ignore the Pengoworks one – it’s a slightly older version (I checked it with diff) of the Dylan version (which btw is a modification of the Pengoworks one, which itself is a modification of the Dylan one).
It goes back and forth, but currently Dylan is the current one.
2: The Dylan one is actually found here: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-autocomplete/source/browse/trunk/jquery.autocomplete.js and not at the link you posted. (I don’t know why he doesn’t update his home page.)
Both Dylan’s and Jörn’s (bassistance) versions are currently “active”. There are others of course, but those are the front runners.
It looks like Jörn’s is more active and has more features (last changed Jun 26, 2008).
OTOH Dylan’s (last changed Mar 25, 2008) is smaller: 8524 (minified) vs 13202 for Jörn’s (also minified). Plus Jörn’s seems to need the ajax queue plugin (1351 bytes), and optionally the bgiframe (1402) which is included in Dylan’s.
For a grand total of 15955 for Jörn’s vs the almost half size 8524 for Dylan. (All numbers minified.)
Now I need to check if I need any of the features in Jörn’s.