I'm writing a website using PHP / MySQL. The website should allow users browsers to be automatically updated when a table is updated in a database (which is caused by someone inserting something though the PHP site). Basically, if the state of the table changes other users on the website should immediately see the changes.
I'm relatively new to PHP / AJAX and other web technologies. The only way I can think of doing this is to have the clients manually recheck the database every second or two via a timer (but this seems like a lot of wasted bandwidth). Is there some way to have the users automatically notified when the database changes?
Thank you!