I found an absolutely awesome application called slGrid. It was recently bought by Senza Limiti, a technology consulting company based in Slovakia. They've since made slGrid an open-source application, which is very cool. It uses AJAX and PHP to provide an interface for creating grids by loading content directly from a database. You specify the table and fields, and it takes care of the rest. Check out the slGrid demo to get a better idea of what it does.
Using slGrid is literally as easy as this:
<?php $_SESSION["grid"]->SetDatabaseConnection("database_name", "user_name", "password"); $_SESSION["grid"]->SetSqlSelect('field1, field2', 'table'); $_SESSION["grid"]->SetUniqueDatabaseColumn("id_field", false); $_SESSION["grid"]->SetTitleName("slGrid"); $_SESSION["grid"]->PrintGrid(MODE_VIEW); ?>