JSP progress bar

[Greg Williams <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Juggies,

Sue Spielman's email lured me over to ONJava.com where I happened across 
an article about a JSP progress bar.  This is kind of interesting to me 
because I inherited a J2EE application that has some long running tasks. 
I've got a 3 minute transaction timeout set in Weblogic and many times 
it exceeds the transaction limit and the task gets cancelled.  I've got 
some work ahead of me to look into tuning this thing, but this app is 
crap and that would be like running over a musical instrument with a 
steam roller, then taking it to the music store and asking them to tune it.

There are situations, too, where the user can just give the system too 
much to do and no amount of tuning is going to get it to finish in less 
than 3 minutes.  So I'm looking into extending the transaction limit. 
However, it's an online system and it would be nice if the user could 
see some progress instead of thinking that it's hung up.  Without 
progress, the users often cancel and restart the task because they're 
used to the unpredictibility of their Windows-based OS.

In the article on ONJava.com, the author's solution is to spin off the 
long task in a thread, forward to a JSP page that uses Javascript to 
repeatedly query a status variable on the session.  The author takes 
some ridiculing from some readers for suggesting this idea.  They're 
worried about heavy user loads kicking off massive numbers of threads 
and basically causing the server to thrash.  The author does suggest 
using a thread pool to mitigate some of that risk.

So what is your take?  Read the article and let me know what you think.

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/06/11/jsp_progressbars.html

Greg

P.S.  If you don't know or have no opinion, you can just tell me what 
your favorite color / Java IDE is. ;-)