"Real Progress Bars in Web Application" article
Who said progress bars cannot be in web applications ? Well, I say they can ! This article will demonstrate how you can improve the quality and the user-friendlyness of your web applications, by using progress bar to keep users informed during long server-side process. Indeed, the fact that a web application runs in a "stateless" and "disconnected" mode, leads us to think such things can't be done. But progress bars can be and without the need for any ActiveX and other dirty Java Applets.
The key thing for creating Progress Bar in a web application, is the browser's ability to display a page before it's totally loaded. We'll use this feature to progressively build and send the page to the client. First, we'll send the HTML code to display a nice and beautiful progress bar. Then, here is the trick, we'll dynamically send some Javascript code blocks that will updates its progression. All these, of course, before closing the HTTP request. In C#, Response.Write() lets us add some HTML to the buffer while Response.Flush() sends all buffered data to the client.
Here is the link to the article : http://www.myblogroll.com/Articles/progressbar
Since it's my first article, I don't know the best website to post that kind of article. CodeProject, Builder.com, any suggestion ?
UPDATE : Doug Thews told me that he posted an article on a similar subject, which has some interesting comments : http://www.ddconsult.com/blogs/illuminati/archives/000089.html