title: AJAX Progress Bar - Polling, Comet?
body: <p>I would like some advice on how to implement the following:</p>
  
  <p>I would like to make my users aware of the progress of a task that is running on my server via AJAX. My server runs a PHP script that downloads a file via shell command using the popen function. It periodically echos/prints what is happening. I would like to capture this output using AJAX and present it to the user.</p>
  
  <p>I was told in another question that I might need to make use of polling or comet? I would really appreciate any help or guidance on how to achieve this in the simplest and most efficient way. Hopefully, I can still make use of JQuery.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you all for taking the time to read this.</p>
  
  <p><strong>P.S. I was able to get this far with thanks to the stackoverflow community.</strong> :)</p>