Question

I’m making a Social networking website for my friends. i wanted to know how i would Update a Div containing few inserted records of the database, when a new record is added in the database. In short you must have seen the live notifications of facebook, which fade in when someone does something . this all happens without the refreshing of the whole live notification div. only the new notification is prepend to the div.

I would like to do this using jquery and AJAX as i have good knowledge about them. and PHP as the server side language.

Thank you in Advance.

P.S : I have searched many websites for the solution, but couldnt find it anywhere. i Even tried going through facebook’s Source code but couldnt find it there too ! I hope someone helps me here ! *crossed fingers*

Answer 1

Basically it goes something like this:

Create a javascript function on your page that makes an ajax call (with jquery or native xhr or what not) to a php page. The php page keeps track of “new stuff” and returns it when called. The js function, when receiving data, add new tags (divs or whatever) to the notification bar. The function is called every once in a while with javascript’s setTimeout function.

If some of these steps are confusing to you please ask a more specific question.