Show animation in a jsp page while waiting for server to respond

Question

Hi everyone,

What would be the best way to display an animation while waiting for server-side processing of a jsp page to complete.Basically, the server side request can take more than a minute to process and until then I would like the user to have some way to get an update of how his request is getting along.I require an animated gif and a line stating that x% has been completed.

One of the methods I came across while surfing the net was to have an intermediate page that shows the animation while loading the actual page using javascript (location.href).So ,I figure use a couple of ajax calls from the intermediate page to a servlet to get the feedback.Problem is it works fine in IE 6/7 and Firefox 3.But the ajax callbacks dont seem to be getting executed in case of Chrome and Opera (The location.href part seems to mess it up and the callbacks never get executed).

If this approach is flawed how should I go about it?.And if not how can i fix this issue?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The simple way I've done this is to go to a JSP that displays a "X % completed" page (image, whatever) that reloads periodically. And when the request is complete, it redirects to an appropriate page to indicate completion. A lot simpler than AJAX, if not as fancy, and requires nothing that is browser-specific.

Answer 2

Try window.location='URL'. Also document.location='URL' works, but I think is deprecated.

Also to be opinionated I do think that a non-reloading web page is much saucier than just being forwarded.