Auto suggest/complete fields are used all over the web. Google has appeared to master it given that as soon as one types in a search query, suggestions are returned almost instantaneously.
I’m assuming the framework for achieving this involves a fast, in-memory data store on the web tier. We’re building a Grails app based around retail products, so a user may search for Can which should suggest things like Canon, Cancun, etc, and wondering if a Java B-tree cached in memory would suffice for quick auto completes returned as JSON over AJAX. Outside of the jQuery AutoComplete field, do any frameworks and/or libraries exist to facilitate the development of this solution?
Autocomplete is a text matching, information retrieval problem. Implementing your own B-tree and writing your own logic to match words to other words is something you could do. But then you would have to implement Porter Stemming, a Vector Space Model, and a String-edit distance calculation.
…or you could use Lucene and its derivatives, which do a lot of this stuff already. If you really care about the data structures used to store this stuff, you could dive into its source. But I highly doubt writing your own and doing it all yourself would be more maintainable and efficient in the long run.
One of the more popular Grails ecosystem plugins for this is Searchable, which was mentioned in Ledbrook & Smith’s Grails in Action. It uses Lucene under the covers, and make sit pretty easy to add full-text search to your domain classes. (For example, check out chapter 8 in GinA or the searchable docs).