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jQuery and Long-Running Web App Processes: A Case Study

I was recently approached by a client’s system administrator with a small but interesting training/development project. The sys-admin, named Rod, had built a simple intranet web application that used a few PHP pages, running on an Amazon EC2 instance, to accept some user input and kick off multiple long-running server side QA deployment processes. He wanted to use Ajax to start the process as well as incrementally display its output, line-by-line, on the same web page. However, waiting for the entire process to finish to display its output was a poor user experience, and he wasn’t able to get an Ajax call to return any output incrementally over the lifetime of the request.