Ajax
From wikipedia: Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.
Examples and References
Rico, http://openrico.org/rico/home.page
- "An open source JavaScript library for creating rich internet applications. Rico provides full Ajax support, drag & drop management & a cinematic effects library.
Yahoo! User Interface library, http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/
AjaxAnywhere, http://ajaxanywhere.sourceforge.net
- "AjaxAnywhere is designed to turn any set of existing JSP or JSF components into AJAX-aware components without complex JavaScript coding.
In contrast to other solutions, AjaxAnywhere is not component-oriented. You will not find here yet another AutoComplete component.
Simply separate your web page into multiple zones, and use AjaxAnywhere to refresh only those zones that needs to be updated." - You can find a very good example (w/ and wo/ ajax) here: http://ajaxanywhere.sweetdev-labs.org:8080/ajaxAnywhereDemo/facesFrame.jsp