How do they make real time data live on a web page?

Question

How do they do this? I would like to have web pages with data fields that change in real time as a person views the web page. Here is an example: link text

How do they do this? Jquery? PHP?

I need to connect my field data to mySQL database.

Erik

Answer 1

Hi,

I did it with JavaScript timer set execution in milliseconds, each time timer executed function that queried Server with Ajax and returned value(possibly JSON format), then you you update your field with the value. I did it each 5 sec and it works perfectly. In ASP.NET I think it called Ajax Timer Control.

Answer 2

There are two things needed to do this:

1. Code that runs on the browser to fetch the latest data. This could be Javascript or something running in a plugin such as Silverlight or Flash. This will need to periodically request updated content from the server.

Which leads to a need for...

1. Code that runs on the server to retrieve and return the latest data (from the database). This could be created with any server sided scripting language.