Many data reduction tasks involve software running in several processes on one computer, or on several processes on each of many computers. This web service allows the end user to keep track of the progress of each 'worker', by displaying a bar chart showing the live status of each worker. The workers send their status to the server with a single HTTP request - that could be a single line calling 'curl http://....' in a shell script, or a requests.get('http://...') function call in a Python script. The web service collates the updates from all of the workers, and allows the users to view the status of all workers, in real time, in a web browser.
Eg: http://ws.mwatelescope.org/progress/show?jobid=demo1