faceted browsing best tools / best practices?

[Golda Velez]

I'm not really a newbie - been programming with MySQL/DBI/Perl for years - but it finally occurred to me, with modern web services/widgets: there should be a good plugin to easily and quickly enable faceted browsing of specified tables within a db. Sure, this is possible by hard coding it, or coding within various MVC frameworks, but why not by using a simple, self-contained framework-independent widget along the lines of MIT Exhibit?

So my question is, does anyone know of such a widget? Or if this 'should' be done only as part of a larger MVC framework, which does the best slickest job of quickly enabling faceted browsing using nice CSS/ajax interface?

Thanks!

--G