With normal form submission I use the pattern Post / Redirect / Get, when processing the forms.

I have a database application built with Django. I want to allow the users to select a number of items from the database, then launch a computationally intensive task based on those items.

I expect the task to take between 10 minutes and 2 hours to complete.

Is there a standard approach to dealing with requests like this (i.e. that don't return immediately)? Ideally there would be some way to display the progress.