I\'m looking to utilize jQuery to handle a few very common requests we get for data tables of varying sizes: scrolling, sorting, and dynamic filtering.
I would encourage you to try out the Flexigrid.
It has a lot of great features and I personally think it looks more professional than the jqGrid.
It doesn't have some of the features that you asking for, but I think it could be a good start. It would be great if you could work on adding some of those features to the code base.
If you are coding in c#, then I posted a blog entry about how to use LINQ to Reflection to bind JSON to the Flexigrid... if you are using another language there are other examples you can find on Flexigrid's Website & Google Group page.