I'm currently building a web app that receives incoming SMS messages and saves them to a SQL server. On the users' side, I have a dashboard where they can see all the people that have been messaged or have sent a message to user. For the sms messaging part I am using Twilio (http://www.twilio.com). Does anyone know of a way to check for new messages and retrieve them without having to reload the entire page?
If they are already being saved to your database then some basic javascript on your page which is polling your server via ajax every x seconds will do.
Have the server side code check the database and return any new entries then insert them into the page using a promise attached to your ajax call. Save the timestamp and use it next time as the cutoff point for messages to return, rinse and repeat.
there are (at least) three ways to accomplish real time updates 1. ajax polling 2. push notifications 3. sockets