On the SitePoint PHP blog today a new tutorial has been posted introducing you to cursor-based pagination of real-time data, showing the results and allowing for easy click-through functionality.

Pagination is a technique for breaking large record sets into smaller portions called pages. As a developer, you should be familiar with implementing pagination, but implementing pagination for real time data can become tricky even for experienced developers. In this tutorial, we are going to discuss the practical use cases and solutions for real time data pagination and cursor based pagination.

He uses results from the Twitter and Facebook APIs in his examples, grabbing tweets matching the search term "php". He briefly explains some of the issues with real-time pagination and how it compares with standard pagination techniques. He uses the "after" and "before" functionality of each API to only pull the data needed, not the entire list of latest posts. This is added to a list in order and shown when the user view is refreshed. He includes the code for implementing the cursor-based handling and how to echo the results back out to a view.