Data Tables

Sometimes called a 'Data Grid', Data Tables is a name for systems that present data to the User Interface in a robust way without unnecessary programming.

1. https://datatables.net/index is a plugin for jQuery that I've used. It's probably the #1 solution in the category
2. http://ajaxpatterns.org/Data_Grid is interesting, but fairly old (2010 last major edit), and doesn't even mention datatables
3. http://lazymofo.wdschools.com/ actually offers a free (MIT licensed) PHP Data Grid

There are other solutions that create CRUD interfaces to databases, but they're either not worth mentioning, or I haven't fully researched it. There used to be a phpGrid that was free (GPL) software, but not now. phpgrid.org and phpgrid.com definitely are not