In this post I will show a example of how to use salesforces animated gif and the visualforce actionStatus component to represent a loading screen to the user. This can be very beneficial if you have a tab panel to switch in between tabs, or if you are rerendering a pageBlockTable etc.. This visual stimulation is much more appealing than a blank white screen or just a static screen that is populating asynchronously, which could confuse or frustrate a user into clicking off the screen.
Here is the markup
Here is the markup
