I've just been spending a load of time with the jQuery UI library and more specifically the sortables extension. What this allows you to do is specify a list of items on your page as sortable, and then every item becomes draggable to re-sort the list as per the demo's here.

However, I've found an issue with the extension in that the update property doesn't fire when the sorting is done by the user (which is said to have been fixed in the next release). For me, this is a showstopper as I need to know the new order immediately, which means I've had to go elsewhere for my sortable lists.

Enter script.aculo.us, the UI extension for the good ol js framework prototype. This supplies much of the same functionality of jQuery UI, but in a much larger package (127K vs jQuery's 70Kb for the same functionality). So how do you work sortables in script.aculo.us?

Well, see the following code:

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This will provide you with pretty much the same functionality as the jQuery option, but will successfully fire the update function when sorting is completed. For more information see here.