Hi all,

I'm about to embark upon a summer weeding project, and would like to do so with the help of a little web tool - perhaps one that you've already invented or for which a generic AJAX-based CRUD interface already exists. (Mostly I think I'm just looking for a low-power AJAX-based CRUD thing.) I'm going to describe what I want it to do, and perhaps you can tell me if you think someone has already done the heavy lifting on creating something like this.

Back end: a database containing the current shelf-list along with some useful bibdata like title, pubinfo, last-checkout-date, total-checkouts, date added to collection, plus some fields for the information we'll be inputing on the front end.

Front end: an iPad/laptop-friendly touch-or-click interface that will allow us to mark individual fields. Some of those would be multiple choice fields like "condition of the book". A free text note field. A few Booleans (e.g. "Someone says this books is a classic and we may never discard it.", "Listed in Best Books for Acad Lib", "I propose we weed this book")

The idea for this interface would be to allow the (de)selector to make notes on each title as s/he goes down the shelf. The selector would be able to easily see bib data and would be able to change the data as the process goes on. I'd prefer to do this on an AJAX model so the database is updated in real time rather than relying on more overt form submission.

I described this as a CRUD (Create, Replace, Update, Delete) thing, but I guess it's really just "U" - updating.

Do you have a nice easy tool for doing AJAX-y db updating from a UI that would allow for the various types of input (pulldowns, Boolean, text fields). Preferably, I'd like to be able to do some visual renderings of some of the data to match our in-house "sticker" system - yellow dots for "we might weed this", green for "we gotta keep this".

Any ideas? I would love to not re-invent this wheel.

Thanks!
Ken