Rails Rendering a Single Partial after Page Load - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a partial page in my application named _dashboard.html.erb. Inside of the dashboard, I have a lot of calls to render different partials. One of those is the _calendar.html.erb partial, which makes a call to google calendar and pulls down a list of events. This load takes time and I want to have the _calendar partial load after the rest of the dashboard has loaded. It should be reiterated that I don't want this to be based on a click event and instead when the page loads.
pages_controller.rb
# Logged in to shift
def jump
#title = "#{User.find(session[:user_id]).firstname}'s Dashboard"
#tasks = Task.where(:completed => 0)
#questions = Question.where(:answered => 0)
serv = GCal4Ruby::Service.new
serv.authenticate("email","pass")
cal = GCal4Ruby::Calendar.find(serv, {:title => "Skidmore Center for Sex and Gender Relations"})
##events = GCal4Ruby::Event.find(serv, {'start-min' => Time.now.utc.xmlschema, 'start-max' => 5.days.from_now.utc.xmlschema })
#events = GCal4Ruby::Event.find(serv, {'start-min' => Time.parse("01/01/2011").utc.xmlschema, 'start-max' => Time.parse("06/01/2011").utc.xmlschema, :calendar => cal.id})
end
Jump is the page where I have the dashboard partial rendering. Here is the part of /app/views/layouts/_dashboard.html.erb that calls the calendar partial:
<div id="main-content">
<div class="post">
<h3>calendar</h3>
<%= render 'layouts/calendar' %>
</div>
</div>
And /app/views/layouts/_calendar.html.erb
<% #events.each do |event| %>
<% if event.start_time >= Time.now and event.start_time <= 5.days.from_now %><li><%= event.start_time.to_s(:short) %> <%= event.title %></li><% end %>
<% end %>
I think what you should keep in mind here is that, while I understand how AJAX works, I have little to no experience coding it by itself or in Rails. Any help here would be appreciated (And the more dumbed-down and explained the better!)
Thanks
Update: I used the async_partial gem but am now having issues with the partial pulling the events from google calendar. The partial works without the async_partial.

Answer 1

One of the way to handle this without a gem, which is quite common by the way, is to use some kind of event handler for the page load event. For instance, with jQuery, you can do :
// this get executed when jQuery is made available, which means when
// your document is ready.
$(function () {
// you replace the actual calendar content with the piece that is
// rendered with your partial
$("#your-calendar-div-id").replaceWith('<%= escape_javascript(render 'layouts/calendar') %>');
});