I am looking to implement web-based autocomplete for structured commands. So, for example, suppose I was trying to implement a web-based Windows command line with autocomplete, in such a case I would want to suggest all the available commands, then, once a user selects a command, all the options for that command, then if a user enters a switch (say '-' dash or '/' slash) then offer all the switches for that command and all the relevant values that can follow, and so on. All from the same text input box.

If you have used version 4.0 of JIRA, I am thinking of something similar to the JQL search input box that they have implemented.

I have not managed to find any tutorials that look at this scenario end-to-end (which is a shame, because it would be great to see more applications that do this). What I am looking for is some guidance on the steps needed to implement this solution:

• Do you have any experience implementing such a solution and if so what components did you use?
• Would you use a framework such as ANTLR to provide the available options to the end user? If not what would do?

Sorry for raising such a general question, but my main problem is working out how the pieces fit together as opposed to, say, how to do autocomplete or how to parse/tokenize an input command...