posted 17 years ago
A quick guess is that this may be part of some code that is designed to keep the user's webapp session alive. I.e., most web app servers have a session timeout that will close out inactive sessions.
However, a user may take a long time writing a reply (or get a phone call, etc). In order to make sure the user does not loose work, there is sometimes a little background javascript application that "pings" the application server as long as the browser open to one of the application's pages. This keeps the session alive even if the user if away but lets the session be cleaned up if the user closes the browser, goes to a different site, and the like.
[originally posted on jforum.net by monroe]