Updating info on a page withou refreshing

[sager]

I'm sure someone here has seen the way sites like scores.***.com/scores/ update information without the user having to refresh the screen and without having to programmatically cause the browser to update the screen. I would like to implement something similar. Anyone have any ideas. Thanks

[mikescham]

Check out the source code. They're using an applet. A rougher way to do this, but also one that doesn't require a Java applet, would be to place a hidden frame in the page that refreshes every certain number of minutes (this is easy to do with a meta-tag or http header), hits the server, retrieves data and on load calls javascript functions in the main page to update the screen. That way it appears your page isn't refreshing since a hidden frame is doing the work.