[bens1901]

Hi. I'm developing a PHP & MySQL site and I would like to have a page like "This may take one minute. Please wait while your request is being processed." come on the web browser when I'm executing a big job.

A good example of the interface that I'm looking for is actually on this site, MacNN. When you do a search in the site, there is a "processing" page that comes up.

Any ideas on how to do this in PHP?

Thanks in advance.

-Ben

[redJag]

You don't need PHP, you just do a re-direct. As far as I know, it isn't actually based on anything server side, rather just making you wait a bit to keep the load on the server down.

[larkost]

There is a way of directly doing this (if you are not writing for a heavily loaded site...), and that is "Server Side Push". I have used it a number of times, but will say that it can be a bit tricky (you have to watch out for buffering and cashing.. not to mention a whole slew of browser specific bugs).

Netscape has a nice basic tutorial that gives an over-view of what this is all about. It is more than a little dated, and does not cover any specific application platform (PHP, ASP..etc), nor does it cover all the bugs out there... but it does give you a nice start:

http://wp.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/pushpull.html