How is a real-time billboard made at Apple?

Question

Apple is currently showing that "the App Store will reach 10 billion downloads soon."

The index page contains a kind of real-time billboard displaying an ever-increasing number of downloads.

They use pure HTML + JS.

What is a real time update? What do you think?

Answer 1

This document seems to be available through AJAX: http://www.apple.com/autopush/us/itunes/includes/countdown.inc?r=0.7329968574922532

Contains:

20-JAN-2011 06:00:00|9944770635|1176919

It would seem that this is in the format:

<timestamp>|<total as of timestamp>|<rate as of timestamp>

javascript , . .

Answer 2

, , , JavaScript , , . , , . .

. ?

Answer 3

XHR, http://www.apple.com/autopush/us/itunes/includes/countdown.inc?r=0.1472943772081361

:

20-JAN-2011 06:00:00|9944770635|1176919 

(9944770635) 06:00 ( , UTC). .

Answer 4

Firstly, it only gets the current score once through ajax (you can check the element and see the xhr request in the firebug HTML and NET panels), and then it animates the "top" and "left" position of each element of the time container.

See screenshot