ok so im working on a site where there are 5 or more results boxes on a page for search results (not web searches, searches of each of my databases) and i want the boxes to appear instantly with an hour glass or spinning wheel in each until each of the results are populated. Is this done using iframes or something similar? An example of what I am trying to do would be to search 4 separate databases for a persons name and put the results in each of the four results boxes... the page appears instantly when a search is started, and the hour glass appears in each box while the query is happening
I think you want to use ajax (making a call to the backend, showing the reply without refreshing the page). Some examples can be found here: http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/ajax_examples.asp
Ajax is mostly Javascript (client side). It can be used with any backend language or without, on its own. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
I found this example incase anyone else is wondering... <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Demo</title> <script type="text/javascript" src="/assets/script/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> </head> <body> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function() { $.ajax({ type: "GET", url: "queryScript.php", success: function(resp) { $("#results").html(resp); } }); }); </script> <div id="results"><img src="/assets/images/icons/loading.gif" width="16" height="16" alt="Loading..." /></div> </body> </html>
thats a useful site, congrats! and with so good domain in .com, it wouldnt be hard to make it have good results..