WYSIWYG-ish AJAX tools?

I'm working with someone who's an experienced system programmer, but is taking on web programming for the first time. What good tools are there to facilitate features like click-to-sort columns in tables, drag-and-drop fields to rearrange ordered values in a table, and other AJAX functionality? I myself am a past Domino developer, and it seems some open source equivalent of the form creation process in Domino would be most useful to him.

Any thoughts? Am I barking up the right tree and are there any useful products on the branches?