I’ve been using Jquery a lot lately and have absolutely fallen in love with it; so much so that I’ve pretty much walked away from Prototype and Scriptaculous entirely. Not to take anything away from Prototype but Jquery is just a lot more… well, it’s just more fun to work with. That being said, I wanted to give a shout out to one of the cooler toys Prototype has: TableKit.

TableKit is a table enhancement JavaScript library written using Prototype provided by Millstream Software. In a nutshell TableKit allows you to easily create sortable, resizable and editable tables. Implementation is extremely simple and, according to Robert Speer, designers don’t have an issue working with it (I haven’t had the pleasure of having a designer work with it yet):

Many times using scripts I find on the Internet turns into kind of a hassle. They are usually unfinished side projects, or are kind of bloated and slow.

TableKit is not one of those scripts, it’s fast & easy to implement. Development time was low, and the designers didn’t complain too much about working with it.

Robert’s right; TableKit is extremely easy to work with. TableKit works by using css class overloading to tell the system how to handle a table. For example:

<table class="sortable resizable editable">

indicates that the table should, obviously, be sortable, resizable and editable. There are all sorts of other options available, which you can read about in the documentation. If you have to use Prototype for a project and you need some jazz TableKit is a good fit.