I went on over to google and started searching to see if I could find any nice libraries that would make the job a little simpler and came across xajax.

This is a really nice PHP toolkit that enables you to add ajax functionality into your web pages extremely easily. All you have to do is include the xajax libraries, create a new xajax object, register a function with the xajax object and include a call to the xajax registered function in your html form, on a button click for example.

Once inside the xajax function you can perform any processing you wish and then return a bunch of html code to be placed inside a container (a div for example) on the calling page.

There are some great little tutorials on the xajax homepage to get you started on your way to lovely ajax enabled web pages.