Live Progress Bar

Users are impatient. Therefore, if you are going to keep them waiting, they deserve to know why and how long they will wait. It's not just in browsers; a lady in a waiting room would have some sense of feedback if she is given a tag and time slot, instead of leaving her there and just asking her to WAIT.

Spinners provide poor feedback for very long request-response activity. Indefinite progress bars are even worse. What you can do is provide a live progress bar that shows the current status. A situation where you:

• Receive a file
• Process the file
• Upload the file
• Save the file name to a database
• Respond with the file information saved

You will definitely need to let the user know what is happening behind the scenes so as to give them a good reason to wait. We will not do all that in our example, rather, we will simulate the time it takes to do each of them using setTimeout.

In each of the async functions, you can send realtime updates to the client informing her about what's ongoing on the server and why she is yet to receive a response.