loading tab content asynchronously

[captainvoid]

Hi, I'm new to RichFaces and I wonder if it's possible to load the content of a tab asynchronously "in the background" via AJAX.
Navigating to the page the first tab would be opened by default and then, somehow connected with the onload event, the content of the second tab retrieved. Like this I can put time consuming data retrievals in the backing bean method responsible for the second tab, and still could achieve a fast initial page delivery.
Could anyone give me a tip on how to approach this ?
Thanks a lot advance!

[captainvoid]

Of course I want the switch type of the tab panel to be "client" so the content loading can start even before the user opens the panel.

[ronanker]

i don't know any component that do that, but it's possible to create one...

more generally it would be usefull to have a <rich:backGroundLoadingPanel> or a new attribute "backGroundLoading" with default 'false'.
with the attribute it's easyer to use on several components like dataTable for exemple.

this would be very cool to improve visual speed of pages and acces to data...

But it seems quite difficult to do. should be a lot of work.