WYSIWYG-ish AJAX tools?

[barking_iguana]

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?

Comments

[chemoelectric.livejournal.com]

Good luck. Free software tends to be written by system programmers, so mostly what you get is fancy HTML editors.

[ray schnitzler (from livejournal.com)]

I suggest you take a look at some HTML5 demos, and see whether there's anything close to what you want there. Beyond that, look at jQuery and some of the frameworks that build on it.

Speaking as someone who hasn't done this stuff in a while.

Ray

[avram]

On my Pinboard, I've got a set of links tagged "ajax" that are things I came across at some point and thought looked potentially useful. (Some of them are just cool things done with AJAX rather than tools or tutorials for learning/using it.) There are also some more general web development links.

[avram]

Did you try googling for ajax dynamic tables? I just did, and found a demo that looks useful.

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

It's not a WYSIWYG editor, but I have a friend who swears by jQuery, which is (this may be off; I don't do much web development) a toolkit which abstracts a lot of the AJAX/DOM stuff, has plugins that make standard tasks (like the ones you mention) easier than doing it straight Javascript, and handles browser compatibility minutae for you. If I were trying to get a functioning app running quickly, it's probably where I'd go first.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend Jquery!

[(Anonymous)]

jQuery is good if you just want access to a lot of ready made components. I prefer Mootools as it's design philosophy is to deliver a better javascript experience, kind of a javascript++.

Regardless, I also suggest spending some small amount of time writing pure javascript with no frameworks at all. You can't use a tool like jQuery to its fullest unless you understand how and what it is abstracting away for you. If your guy is new to javascript it has some real quirks that one needs to understand before going too deeply into Javascript. Javascript is not a functional language and not an OOP language, it is a prototype-driven language. And what you can do with a prototype-driven language will confuse you if you jump straight into coding for a framework without know what the framework is doing for you.