I've been searching and iterating a lot recently trying to figure out how to have a real time progress bar on the webpage to show the progress of programs running at the backend at the server.
Right now I'm using Django for building the website as I need to run python programs on the server. So far when the web user click "submit" button, it will take the python program (written in views.py) about one minute to present the result and having a progress bar can really help here.
Hope I provided enough detail about my question and thank you in advance for any one who can help.
I think you can create a background task and use AJAX for pulling the current status and present it to the user.
Take a look at the celery project: http://www.celeryproject.org/.
It may help you manage your background tasks and works great with django!
Hope it helps...