Change only a part of a web page content

I need to change a part of my web page content dynamically
without refreshing the entire page. Like myspace or facebook users gallery.

Anybody knows for a good quality link of a tutorial or any useful scripts
with working back button and changing address URL accordingly?

Thanks for any suggestion.

 

Dynamic update of some part of a page - AJAX.
You can read about it at W3Schools.com.

 

Cool tutorial but I need something more complex...

If you observe myspace it handles:

-Back/Forward Button
-Bookmarking/Creating shortcut
-Full URL in the address bar
-Full URL link in the left botom of the status bar

There are a lot of tutorials about, but all for begginers or just partial solutions.

I need a professional complete scene.

However, Thank You.

 

If it is a simple update I'd user jQuery to periodially poll something in the background and update the page accordingly.

http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax

setTimeout(poll, 10000); // every 10 seconds

function poll(){
$.get('my_url_returns_a_chunk_of_html', myCallback);
}
function myCallback(data, textStatus){
$('#somediv').html(data); // just replace a chunk of text with the new text
setTimeout(poll, 10000);
}
This could be a lot better and handle when the text hasn't changed and error handling etc but is a start.

If you need it to be instant your looking at Comet but in general it adds a lot of complexity so I'd stay away out of simplicity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29

 

er, if you also observe their usability data, people are leaving myspace like its the titanic 2...

it's true, you can build a site that does not change url and uses ajax only to fetch data and update parts as needed. but this is really crap with regards to usability. first off - you can't easily bookmark it. pressing back / forward on the browser WILL have unexpected results.

the url management is doable as anchors to a degree so you can restore the view based upon a url - but it's just silly.

don't get me wrong, i am all for dyanmic updates of dom elements through ajax or otherwise - just don't think it has to take over and modify the browser and user behaviours.

also, consider the SEO - you'd only ever broadcast 1 page which then goes and fetches NN smaller 'content' ones as barebones data - you need to be careful how you structure it, I have seen some piss poor attempts at doing this.

as a whole, it is achievable - but it's hard to get it right. which - i imagine - is why you are struggling to find an out of the box solution for this or a tutorial...

if you want a second opinion, I suggest you go to www.stackoverflow.com and post your question there - you will get the best advice as voted by your coding peers and be able to take it from there.

good luck and be sure to post resulting work here - just curious

 

I just checked out stackoverflow.com. Is this a fairly popular site in the developer community right now?

 

yes, it's the top place for coding advice as far as i can tell... depends on the subject though, some tags are more popular than others.