Need help with App

[beeman000]

I am building a fantasy football site for my friends and I, and I need a little help. I have programmed a few sites using php, but am still relatively new to the language. I wanted to have a page where we use our usernames and passwords to log into, and then we draft our teams. I am a little unsure as to how to create a live app like that. So that once someone drafted the information was updated instaneously on everyone's screens. I dont want everyone to have to constantly hit refresh to see the latest move....Can anyone offer a suggestion? Is this possible?
Thanks

[jpmoriarty]

i think you'll have to look elsewhere if you dont want to refresh - the only way you could do it with PHP would be to have the pages refresh automatically, but that's not going to be ideal.

This about how php works - it only does its programming bit when a request is sent to the server, and that involves a change of page (and a refresh of sorts). You're looking for more of a "live" application, so think that flash might be more up your street (but that's just a guess too).

[amchargue]

Maybe a java applet. That's the only thing I can think of that can send/receive/display data while the user sits on his butt, unless the page has a refresh (if you didn't know, you can use <meta> tags to force a refresh every X seconds). Maybe there's a free applet out there that would do something like what you want...

As for me and my friends, we just bite the bullet and pay a fee to Sportsline.com and use their system ... they have a java version and an html(javascript) version for the java-impaired; the latter uses refresh. If that's how a huge site like that does it, you can bet there's probably no better way.