Hi All,
I need program an interface along the lines of kayak.com - i.e., a nifty set of controls to filter data. Do I need to invent the UI from scratch, or are them some packages out there that can help? I have PHP/Smarty/MySQL experience, but I can learn new stuff, if that's needed.
Thanks!

Hi All,
I need program an interface along the lines of kayak.com - i.e., a nifty set of controls to filter data. Do I need to invent the UI from scratch, or are them some packages out there that can help? I have PHP/Smarty/MySQL experience, but I can learn new stuff, if that's needed.
Thanks!

Never heard of an open source program that would that... however it wont be a bad idea to do it from scratch... it is relatively simple application.

cheers,

You will not just find an open set of application that is just drag and drop. Combining multiple data sources (especially different imput formats from difference agencies) and then filtering the data will always take some programming.
Kayak seems like it just brings in multiple data feeds (prob all XML) from multiple providers and then puts them all into one web interface. Doesn't sound that hard, but there will not be a tool that just drags and drops stuff like that.
If you can put all of that data into a data source (temp storage or database) then there are tools that allows you to redefine the results and filter that. You will just want to look for a advanced reporting tool (crystal reports even used to do that).

Thanks. I am not looking for the back-end software, but for the graphical widgets/Ajax code on the front-end.

I wrote stuff like that from scratch few years ago (I used hidden iframe to communicate with server as xmlhttprequst was not supported as it is now). Then I rewrote it all again couple years ago. I am in process of rewriting entire framework again. Good thing this time is there are few community developed libraries which I will use in latest version so hopefully this one will have longer life span.

Take a look at http://script.aculo.us and http://jquery.com, I used them both and jquery is the library of choice for me. I do not like jquery UI as it is now so I wrote my own widgets, but base library and some community submited plugins made that work very easy.