How does one do realtime updates of a web page?

Question

Google\'s GMail service does it because it integrates Google Talk -- and Etherpad (now typewith.me) made famous the system which is used by, for example, Google Wave. All su

Answer 1

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML or AJAX

With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax techniques has led to an increase in interactive or dynamic interfaces on web pages. Data is usually retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object. Despite the name, the use of XML is not actually required, nor do the requests need to be asynchronous.