How do I handle a large amount of user comments being displayed in a long list down a page using JQuery?

Question

I'm wondering if doing this along in JQuery would be stable enough? or if it would need to be done in ruby/rails first?

Either way I don't want a butt load of messages being loaded when a user enters the page where they're displayed. What I want is limit results to a specific amount then either have the page load more results when a user scrolls down or have them click a "load more" button similar to how it's done on both facebook and googleplus.

Currently I have comments scrolling down my page for miles and would like to use jQuery to take control of this. I'm guessing since each comment is stored in a div / class I could use this as a way of recognising what a comment is.

Anyway trying to figure out the best way to approach this I'd really appreciate some advice and maybe links to some good tutorials on how to pull this off.

Answer 1

I agree with the Ohgodwhy's comment - use will_paginate in Rails.

However, I'd also look at how to do scroll-down pagination, rather than page number links, depending on your design. I like Ryan Bates's screencast on this topic: http://railscasts.com/episodes/174-pagination-with-ajax

He also has a video for doing it without will_paginate: http://railscasts.com/episodes/114-endless-page (the newer, revised version of this requires a subscription).