Duplicate explorer/outlook type application on a web page

Question

We have an ancient application that basically duplicates a file explorer, outlook style application in html (menu and toolbar on top, tree on the left, gridview on the right, and yes I know it is a bad idea to bring desktop UI to the web, but it was 2000 and seemed like a good idea at the time). The main problem (other than the HTML is from ~2000) is that it is an Internet Explorer only application, and due to the horrible html is a nightmare to update.

What is the best set of HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP libraries to achieve this? I have looked a YUI, MooTools, JQuery, and a bunch of others but none seem to have exactly what I need. I would prefer if I could just use PHP libraries, but good HTML/CSS/Javascript libraries would be fine too. The requirements are:

1. Menus (Top Menu and Context Menu).
2. Tree (preferably ajax, lazy loading, we have 5000 nodes in the tree and it takes a while to load now).
3. Windows and Modal Dialog boxes.
4. Splitter for the Grid and the TreeView.

Nice to haves

1. Heirachacal grid.
2. Tool tips.

Thanks in advance for the suggestions...

Answer 1

I would suggest looking at ExtJS for this sort of thing. You can then quite easily send data between it and PHP using JSON. The grids and trees are very easy to populate from a URL that will provide JSON.

Answer 2

Have you checked Qooxdoo or Capuccino? It looks like they might cover the UI necessities that you have for this particular project, given that they are oriented to provide the GUI Desktop goodness to the web; make sure to check their demos.

As for the Server side PHP part, I would certainly try to taylor it to my needs but If I had to choose a framework I would go for Yii, Code Igniter or CakePHP, depending of your scalability needs.

Cheers!