How do they do it?

auto refresh without page refresh

[rfung]

has anyone heard of <snip>? they are a meta search engine that searches through expedia, orbitz, etc,etc,etc.

They have a really cool feature that allows them to refresh the screen as results start coming in from the different sites they search through - the whole price table gets 'redrawn' with the lowest price at the top.

Anyone have any ideas on how to do this? I'm sure this isn't php specifically per se, but some sort of html command that allows the client to be refreshed from xml(?) data from the server?

[edited by: jatar_k at 5:36 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] removed url [/edit]

[mincklerstraat]

This would take a bit of explanation - probably the best would be to read Harry Fueck's two 'Crouching Javascript, Hidden PHP' entries at his sitepoint blog 'Dynamically Typed'. Mr. Fuecks has a great mind for delving into sticky PHP questions, is pretty good at explaining issues which are actually rather complicated, and is a good writer to boot. He writes very little that's not worth reading.

[edited by: jatar_k at 4:43 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] removed url [/edit]

[jollymcfats]

They have an invisible IFRAME with a page refresh hitting the server for more search results. I didn't look in the IFRAME, but 99% likely the server is returning Javascript on each refresh that inserts data into the main page's table via DOM manipulation.

If you're comfortable with cross-frame data sharing in Javascript, it's a useful technique for all sorts of client/server communication.