OpenSourcery

I am writing an application where I have a block whose data is coming from a 3rd-party service. Since querying that service can take some time, I am caching the data locally, so pages load very quickly. However, in the interest of keeping the data more up-to-date than the hourly updates that happen during cron runs, I had the idea to have the client browser periodically poll for updated data. Fortunately javascript (and Drupal's jQuery implementation) makes it fairly easy to set up this periodic polling from the client side.