Check out this absolutely excellent use of AJAX
 

<a href="http://www.fohguild.org/forumspy/forumspy.php" target="_blank">http://www.fohguild.org/forumspy/forumspy.php</a>

I don't believe you need an account there to see it in action. Basically that page auto-updates dynamically every time there's a post in one of the forums. There's also a great looking mouseover window that pops up at the bottom of the screen with thread preview in it.

It's hooked into every forum in the network of sites, not just the FoH site, so any time any of the uberguilds network sites gets a post, it updates that list.

(Before anyone asks, it's hand-coded by them, and they aren't sharing. I'd LOVE to have that on my site.)

Very, very slick.

I consider that a horrible missuse of AJAX. It's doing the same thing as the dreadful AJAX chat script does. Polling the server every 5000 ms. That would bring a lot of sites down. If they have the server power then that's fine. But it is still not what ajax is designed to do. You could do the same thing with php and a header refresh.

As Jump said, this is not what AJAX is for.

Still looks pretty nifty though. :classic:

could look better i think..

/me still thinks it's nifty. :P

Woah, way to kill your server. Not getting anywher near any of mine .....

Digg and quite a few other websites use such a script as well. It either is not as resource intensive as it may seem or they all have powerful enough servers to not have to worry about it :).

If you're on a cluster or a load balanced setup, you probably wouldn't have anything to worry about.

Which leaves the other 99.9% who's sites would come to a crawl.

This kind of thing is what gives AJAX a bad rap. The purpose of AJAX is to give the end user interactive feedback as close to realtime as possible. To simulate the look and responce of a desktop application.

It is not designed as a non interactive page refresher. It's a good thing they don't release it.

The beauty of coding is that it can be "for" whatever you want it to be.

Those guys (and myself) obviously think that's a pretty good use of AJAX. ;)