I was viewing the score for the cricket match between India and England from Yahoo! India Cricket portal. The problem being a web programmer is that you always tend to look at each web page from the development perspective and something grabbed my attention. The web page was refreshing every 60 seconds to get the latest score and a new request/response is generated every time. (Ok so have you got what I was thinking about?) Why are they not using AJAX to refresh the scores rather than refreshing the whole page every time?
The web developer inside me got out and I immediately checked the other sites which are also offering the cricket scores. I checked Sify and Rediff. Even they are not using AJAX and are refreshing the whole page every time. But the refreshing interval was different. Here is the refreshing interval which I got by looking at their META tag.
| Rediff | 480 seconds |
| Yahoo India | 60 seconds |
| Sify | 60 seconds |
The obvious advantage in using the AJAX approach (XMLHTTP) is that the amount of data that is going to get transferred from the server is going to be less and it’s going to save the bandwidth by leaps and bounds.
I would be really happy if any one from either Sify or Rediff or Yahoo! India reads this and just gives a thought about it. And do any of you guys know how to get the raw data about the scores and the license requirement (if available). I am thinking of giving it a try and build a POC (Proof of Concept) app, if the data is available.
Oops!, by the time I could compose this post, the match has been stopped due to rain 🙁