PHP programs or Web applications
<p>Does php have the ability to do this:</p>

<p>Let's say you have an observatory. To start a photographing run, you would load the page and click a button. This would make the server start another script, which would run in the background. The page would then update every second (or whatever) with the current information about the observatory.</p>

<p>What I am wondering is if PHP can run in the background like that, and still provide updated status information on page refresh.</p>
