Hello Atlas auto-complexion

Microsoft launched their Atlas AJAX framework, and, you know what, the two top items on their “Behaviours and client components” (warning, Word format) list are “auto-completion” and “drag and drop”. Sound familiar?

First off, looking at their code, they were certainly a bit inspired by my code (and also by Sam’s code). I can see it’s difficult to give credit, but hey, you know, that sucks.

To use Atlas auto-completion, you need to wade through a 23-page long document (warning again, Word format), while you can use the script.aculo.us control with two lines of code in Ruby on Rails.

The codebase is about the same size as the script.aculo.us control, but doesn’t do a lot of things (please correct me if I’m wrong):

• No CSS-based styling
• Using cursor keys you can’t use cursor down at the end of a list to go back to the top (same with cursor up at the start of the list)
• No fade-in/fade-out effects (no wonder, as their “Adding further UI Enahncements” (sic!) section just lists “1. coming soon, 2. coming soon”)
• No tokenizing (more than one entry being auto-completed)
• No local completion (using a prepared JavaScript array)

P.S. Did I say that script.aculo.us auto completion fixes the dreaded Internet Explorer “windowed controls” bug, while theirs doesn’t?

Update: Read more on this over at David’s blog.

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