How does Facebook do this...?

[markvaughn2006]

If this is the wrong section sorry, I'm thinking this some kind of ajax call. On Facebook, if you scroll all the way down and click "Older Posts" and it looks like it is loading and then drops down with older posts. Could someone please point me in the right direction of how this might be done?? Thanks sooo much!

[trq]

You would simply find the visible screen area, work out when a user is near the bottom of the screen, make an Ajax call to load 5-10 more articles.

[Omirion]

We know that:

  All posts are in a DB somewhere.

 

So lets say:

    we have n posts displayed. And there are m posts in total m>n

 

So we:(in theory)

    Make an ajax request to a PHP script that gets x posts from the DB. The PHP script then returns the posts.

    insert into array.

    foreach(item in array){display html + post}

    ???

    Profit!!

 

Feel free to replace m, n , x with whatever numbers you want.

and PHP with python, .NET , ASP , Java , C etc...