This is based on the gifsocket made by Alvaro Videla: https://github.com/videlalvaro/gifsockets.

Go to doHeavyWork.php, and you will see a progressing animated gif. The gif generated by the java class Pigs, which uses a delayed loop to add frames to the gif and push them to the client.

The java class could do something else, like uploading a file or transcoding a video, and report the progress to the client via the gifs.

Everything is ready to run, but you might have to build the java classes and set the permission on the pigs.bat and pigs.sh script.

To compile the java run this code:

$ javac.exe -classpath java/commons-io-2.4.jar -d classes/ java/*.java

You can test the java file by running the following code and opening the generated image in the browser.

$ cd classes
$ java Pigs noDelay > ../output.gif

This is a program that uses gifsockets and you want to know why I used PHP and Java?

Some of the Java code is from http://www.fmsware.com/stuff/gif.html