A possibly underused technique available to PHP developers is the ability to spawn a background PHP script without JavaScript. All you need to do this is the cURL library and a few lines of code. Let me explain, suppose you have a script that is going to take minutes (or longer) to run, you don’t want to sit looking at a blank screen, and your users certainly won’t! In this kind of scenario you can separate out that logic to a background file and leave your view free for other things, perhaps to query the database to see how the background process is doing?