Import - Prevent timeouts by sending an In Progress page or updating a progress bar in the client browser periodically during import processing

(Hopefully there is some existing library functionality we can find and use for this.)

Clients have had problems with web server timeouts for larger import operations. If we can figure out a way to display and update a progress bar/in progress page every N (~15) secconds - this would prevent the problem.

Did a quick search and found a PEAR HTML Progress bar widget - but not sure if it does what we want and how hard it would be to use it. Check out:
http://pear.laurent-laville.org/HTML_Progress/examples/

If PEAR doesn't have a good solution - please search for other Open Source solutions. If none, we probably should hold off rather than trying to build something from scratch.