Asynchronous client script callbacks
There has been a lot of interest in the web-facing community lately about a new useability feature that goes by a number of different names—XMLHTTP, AJAX, out-of-band requests, and asynchronous client script callbacks, to name a few.
Regardless of the name, this feature provides a way for a standard web page to make calls back to the server, without a traditional page refresh. The user is oblivious to the fact that a server call has occurred, and is not interrupted by it.