Apologies for the blog silence. I was secretly spending time with my new love. It was quality time, yet painful struggles were also part of it.

I'm talking about jQuery, readers. I needed an autosuggest component for a web project, you know, those controls that suggest values as you type ahead. I was looking for a lightweight, beautiful, flexible robust one, based on jQuery. One that can handle multiple values. I failed to find one with all those qualities. So I created one, a very good one, if I may say so myself.

I call this component "TagDragon", don't ask me why. Here's a screenshot:

In this instance, I have styled it in black. You can style it anyway you like though. It's hooked up to a table that contains all snake species of the world, but of course you can hook it up to any data source or platform, as long as it speaks JSON. It also works on text areas:

There are many things you can configure, whilst the library is still very light (3KB). It works in Firefox 2,3, IE 6,7,8 beta, Opera 9 and Safari. Perhaps more, but I cannot test all browsers. It takes a single line of Javascript, a single line of markup per field, and some simple CSS rules to integrate. There's more, let's just throw in the feature list:

• Single value, multiple value, free value
• Works for input boxes and text areas
• Just one line of Javascript
• Lightweight library (<3K)
• Easy to style
• Superb cross browser support
• Full Unicode support
• Keyboard navigation
• Easy to integrate into any back-end
• Does not conflict with other plugins
• Gracefully handles disabled Javascript
• Slim markup, no trickeries
• Allows for multiple controls per page
• Configurable value seperator
• Configurable caching
• Configurable delay
• Configurable result limit

I went through hell and back to get it to the current level of quality. I even created a dedicated site for it:

On the TagDragon site is more information, an online demo, documentation, and more.

Considering all this effort, I have decided to do things differently this time. I will not release this component as open source. Instead it is required donationware, meaning that you have to pay a small fee for it. 100% of the revenue will be used to fund my project JungleDragon, a charitable cause!

Let's see how this goes...I hope you like it, and am anxious to here about your feedback.

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