Best Practice for Server Processing

I recommend you take a look at the AJAX in Plugins page which should solve your woes with redirects. http://codex.wordpress.org/AJAX_in_Plugins

You can send whatever you want to be processed asynchronously. This is a pretty standard way of processing forms in WordPress both on the front-end and back-end.

If you need to include user data, add the current user ID to the jQuery.post data array to be sent to your AJAX hook.