The Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is a stateless protocol. That means server just forget about you when your request is served and the connection between server and client is immediately closed after that. For example, when you made a request for page a.html, the server send you the a.html. After that, you made second request for b.html. In that time, the server won't recognize that you are the one who previously request a.html.

After my previous article about creating PHP Progress Bar using flush() function and Javascript, I try to create another PHP progress bar using different approach. This time, I will not use flush() function. Instead, I will use Ajax method and jQuery to accomplish the task. Basically, in this new progress bar we will use jQuery Ajax library to trigger the long running process in the web server and then use jQuery Ajax library again to read the progress status and display it in the browser.

Recently, I work on a project for developing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software for a company which selling vegetables. It's not the company that I will talk about here, but the ERP that I develop. Actually I didn't develop it from scratch but using an Open Source ERP software. After researching some software, I choose FrontAccounting because it's very suitable to my needs, easy to setup, and designed for small and medium enterprise just like my client company.

Updating Drupal core can be a difficult process because Drupal still doesn't support core update in online way. We must download the core first, extract it, then upload it to our server manually. This process can take more time because of so many manual operations. In order to solve that problem, I try to create a PHP script to make the update process easier. We just need to open a URL with some query string and then the script will download the requested Drupal core to our server. What we need to do next is run the update.php.

If you have a long running PHP script that executes many processes, you may need to inform user about the progress of the process when the script is still running and hasn't finished yet. Using progress bar can be the best option. We can combine the PHP flush() function, Javascript, and also CSS to create a nice progress bar.