alt-tab sort of web design

Question

I am thinking of designing a web site having multiple related services. For every action of the user in a service there will be some computation going on in each of the other services.

I want to display the service in action (chosen by the user) in the middle of the page in enlarged mode and rest of the services as small sized (shrunk) versions around the enlarged mode.

The services which are shown in the shrunk version, should actually show what is happening in that service, at run time as if that was the chosen service. A close match to this sort of behavior I know is in Reliance BigTV, where all the small images of all the channels will be going on, and we can choose the one that we want to watch. After choosing that one image will become big and occupy the screen.

Please, let me know if I can do some thing like this using css, html, ajax & php.

Answer 1

You can boil this question down to "can I show the status of server-side processes on a client side browser?"

Current approaches to this would include polling the server for updates with an AJAX call, or using a "Comet" approach to engineer a push from the server to the client.

See also these questions:

• Ajax Tutorial
• Is there some way to PUSH data from web server to browser?