I am exercising a simple application with HTML client that uploads a file to the server and must display a progress bar :)
The server is servlet-based, some servlet
I think you have to implement the progress bar in javascript on the client side.
Anyway, this link gives an explanation of how to do it using JQuery.
The server can obtain the size of the multipart being uploaded from the HTTP request header; see @ilya's answer. However, getting that information and the count(s) of bytes read so far into a stream of HTTP responses that display or update a progress bar would be rather complicated ...