I had planned on building some extra functionality into jQPie to fit certain needs but after playing with Ext and its jQuery support all my needs have been met. A basic example of the paging/data grid module running off php, works pretty nice. http://projects.cyberlot.net/jqpie/examples/paging.html

The jQPie project provides a lightweight interface to iQuery. Check out some examples of what it can do on its wiki page.