NYCPHP Meetup

[Brent Baisley]

Use AJAX instead to refresh just the part of the page that needs
refreshing. If it's a fair chunk of information, you set a "version"
on the server so the AJAX call just checks the current version vs it's
version. If it's different, then you refresh the content. If it's not
different, no need to refresh anything and you only did a light weight
server call, so you could do it every 15 seconds.

Brent Baisley

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:49 AM, David Mintz <david at davidmintz.org> wrote:
>
> I've got users working collaboratively all day long on a set of database
> records. The view in front of them is frequently stale. A common old Web 1.0
> approach to solve this was to reload the page automatically every n seconds
> with a meta refresh. Nowadays we have xhr. Either way, my concern is as the
> W3C points out, an unexpected refresh can disorient users.
>
> I have thought of displaying a thingy at page load time that says "reloading
> automatically in 5 minutes" and then updating via Javscript it to count
> down  4, 3, 2 and after maybe 30 seconds start counting off seconds, then
> update via ajax. The upside is they won't get (or at least shouldn't be)
> surprised. The downside is more clutter, potentially annoying and/or
> distracting. But I think you could put a discrete little timer thingy that
> ought not be too irritating.
>
> I understand the problem is so common that someone has coined "Asynchronous
> MVC."
>
> What do YOU do about this sort of thing?
>
> --
> David Mintz
> http://davidmintz.org/
>
> The subtle source is clear and bright
> The tributary streams flow through the darkness
>
> _______________________________________________
> New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List
> http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
> http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
>