title: Receive multiple responses from one AJAX (at different periods in time)
body: <p>I'm looking to create interfaces that are strictly static-html and AJAX-based (meaning all the serverside processing occurs within servlets, not at initial-request-time or with forms).</p>
  
  <p>It's great, and i love it, but i'm finding that i want to make the interface give more timely information to the user on the status of their request. Specifically, i want to have one request go out, the server to do multiple tasks in succession, and return a response after each task is done.</p>
  
  <p>Before you ask, these successive tasks are reliant on one-another. They should all occur in sequence. It's not a matter of condensing different functions' responses into one request, it's a matter of giving realtime feedback to the user. The whole process can take up to a minute, and i'd prefer to give the user feedback during the process.</p>
  
  <p>I also know that i could make some huge solution that saves progress data to an external source (like SQL or files) and have a separate getProgress() servlet which simply queries and returns that, but it's so bulky and unecessary, and adds so many dependencies for the sake of a little user feedback.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any known, elegant way to receive multiple responses for a single AJAX request?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: clarified wording</p>