How to refresh only part of page using GAE

I searched about this concept, but don't really understand how it works exactly. My backend is using webapp2 and GAE, and I want to refresh a page that pulls from my database.

There's other content on the page, and I only need to refresh the table contents specifically. I currently am using

    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10">

to refresh the entire page every 10 seconds, but I need something that only refreshes part of the page. An explanation of any JS or JQuery additions would be great!

The part that I really don't understand is what I have to change on the backend to allow this kind of refreshing.