Zend_ProgressBar is a component to create and update progressbars in different environments. It consists of a single backend, which outputs the progress through one of the multiple adapters. On every update, it takes an absolute value and optionally a status message, and then calls the adapter with some precalculated values like percentage and estimated time left. Zend_ProgressBar is quite easy in its usage. You simply create a new instance of Zend_Progressbar, defining a min- and a max-value, and choose an adapter to output the data. If you want to process a file, you would do something like: update($currentByteCount); } $progressBar->finish(); ]]> In the first step, an instance of Zend_ProgressBar is created, with a specific adapter, a min-value of 0 and a max-value of the total filesize. Then a file is processed and in every loop the progressbar is updated with the current byte count. At the end of the loop, the progressbar status is set to finished. You can also call the update() method of Zend_ProgressBar without arguments, which just recalculates ETA and notifies the adapter. This is useful when there is no data update but you want the progressbar to be updated. If you want the progressbar to be persistent over multiple requests, you can give the name of a session namespace as fourth argument to the constructor. In that case, the progressbar will not notify the adapter within the constructor, but only when you call update() or finish(). Also the current value, the status text and the start time for ETA calculation will be fetched in the next request run again. Zend_ProgressBar comes with the following three adapters: Zend_ProgressBar_Adapter_Console Zend_ProgressBar_Adapter_JsPush Zend_ProgressBar_Adapter_JsPull