In a new post today Alex Netkachov shows a handy little tip for the Eclipse users out there that want to use the @var type hint in their code.

@var variable type hint is very useful, but adding it a little bit complex: usually you need to type the class name or copy/paste it from somewhere. But with Eclipse PDT templates you can simplify this and add an autocomplete for variable name and class name.

It's a simple one-step process - you just add in a new template to your Eclipse application and it will prompt you to select the class name from a list and drop it right in. No more cut and paste needed!

Alex Netkachov made a happy discovery recently and wanted to share it, so he blogged about it - the inclusion of his suggestion into the nightly build of the PDT extension for Eclipse:

Happy dreams of PHP developers come true. Yesterday I received a letter from Eclipse PDT bugzilla with notification that my proposition about autocomplete for properties that submitted more than a year ago is implemented in PDT 2.0 nightly builds.

There's a screenshot included in the post and he points to the download page where you can grab the files you'll need.

Wolfgang Drews (of DynamicWebPages) has posted a mini-tutorial on his personal blog showing how to integrate the popular Zend Framework with the YUI Javascript libraries from Yahoo! to create an autocomplete field in your app.

Maybe this short snippet helps someone out there when using YUI autocomplete feature together with the Zend Framework or any other Framework, that creates URLs like http://domain.tld/controller/action/param/value.

He modifies the Yahoo library to change a few of the defaults to make it more Zend Framework-friendly: changing the default query format and updating the "append parameters" concatenation to replace the ampersand with a slash.

Richard Thomas has released the latest version of his extensible framework today - jQPie 0.3.

The main thing in this release is the addition of an auto complete and a grid example based of the extjs library, One thing to keep in mind the css files provided by extjs will overrun pretty much any css you have, the main one being ext-all.css, It seems some things are set in here that are required for the examples to work but at the same time it styles pretty much every element in existence.

jQPie is a "a lightweight PHP interface to jQuery. The lightweight interface allows multiple ways to interact." It also has a plugin interface that allows other modules to be built on to the core functionality. Check out its wiki for more information.

Richard Thomas has decided to change the name of his project from the generic "Pjq" to something a bit more distinctive - jQPie.

I have expanded on this further, found a tastier name and now have a project page up http://projects.cyberlot.net/trac/jqpie/wiki. Added an cheesy jQuery/Interface autocomplete example although I would of preferred a json approach to the xml but it works never the less.

The jQPie project provides a way to link Javascript and PHP easily through the jQuery library with simple requests to use things JSON statements and direct output in your Javascript application.

PHPBuilder.com is back with part two of their look at building an application combining PHP and Ajax (as excerpted from the Apress book "Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional"). Part one for the series is here.

A nice feature that I first noticed as being received positively by the Internet community is the auto-complete feature in Gmail. [...] The next example will show you how to do the same thing - although it's not quite as in-depth as the Gmail solution.

They start with the CSS and Javascript to make the application work, including a simple XMLHttpRequest object for the Ajax connection. The "autocomplete" function is called via an onKeyPress event in the form on the page, grabbing the content and firing off a request to the backend script. The also include a series of screenshots that show the different steps of the process from entering the information down to outputting the results.