There are several ways to interact with the server apart from the traditional request\response and refresh all protocol. They are polling, long polling, Ajax and Websockets ( pusherapp ). Of all these Ajax and Websockets have been very popular. There is another way to interact with the server such that the server can send notifications to the client using Server Sent Events (SSE) . SSE is a part of HTML5 spec: http://dev.w3.org/html5/eventsource/
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