NYCPHP Meetup

[Ajai Khattri]

On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, David Mintz wrote:

> I've got users working collaboratively all day long on a set of database
> records. The view in front of them is frequently stale. A common old Web 1.0
> approach to solve this was to reload the page automatically every n seconds
> with a meta refresh. Nowadays we have xhr. Either way, my concern is as the
> W3C points out, an unexpected refresh can disorient users.
> 
> I have thought of displaying a thingy at page load time that says "reloading
> automatically in 5 minutes" and then updating via Javscript it to count
> down  4, 3, 2 and after maybe 30 seconds start counting off seconds, then
> update via ajax. The upside is they won't get (or at least shouldn't be)
> surprised. The downside is more clutter, potentially annoying and/or
> distracting. But I think you could put a discrete little timer thingy that
> ought not be too irritating.
> 
> I understand the problem is so common that someone has coined "Asynchronous
> MVC."
> 
> What do YOU do about this sort of thing?

In the future, this might be addressed by Comet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)


-- 
Aj.