Many months ago I bought a book on CSS, DHTML and AJAX and have only got around to flicking through it now.

To make cool webpages nowadays you probably also need to know PHP (or ASP.net) Javascript (or Silverlight or Flash) and of course HTML and maybe XML too - As well as some way to store and retrieve data in a database such as mySQL.

Thats quite a bit of stuff just to make a webpage. But anyway - I wrote my first bit of AJAX code today, instead of having to refresh the browser to reload the highscores in Attack of the Meeplings theres a little refresh button you can click and it only refreshes the highscore table and not the whole page -Pretty neat huh?

So its not as cool as gmail or with its little animations and automatic refreshing, but I’m not too sure what kind of effect on performance polling the server will have whilst playing the game. I’m pretty new at this webscripting stuff so I’m sure there’s some best practices way to handle it.