Progress bar

Hi guys

Need a little help with 'prettying' up my system a bit.

I have a system where the user enters a job number in a JSP which is posted to a Servlet, the Servlet then goes off looking through a directory structure for a matching job and retrieves the files, documents etc from that folder and displays them toi screen. Now all this works but for one slight problem... It takes around 10+ seconds for a response (probably due to directory size and network speed), so for 10 or more seconds the user has nothing to see, so it's easy to presume nothing happened and to either give up or start attacking the 'submit' button with clicks. Sure there's the progress bar at the bottom of IE but how of have we seen that sit at 25% claiming to be loading a webpage!

What I need is a way of, on the POST the JSP loads some sort of PLEASE WAIT (this can be a cheesy animated GIF) which stays until the POST redirects to the results page. Is there any way of doing this from the Servlet, or do i need to adapt a JS function?

Not a Java question, but not really right for HTML and JavaScript, either. Still, the techniques will be independent of server technology, so off we go.

I am not sure but progress bar is one of the design pattern in Ajax. Let us know if you find something like that.

When the user click submit first take them to a pleasewait.jsp where you can display your creative animated please wait or progress bar gif image. In its body tag write onload event where you actually submit to the real action.

I implement this way in one of our project.