Lightweight way to have attractive paneled app layout in HTML/jquery/jqueryui etc?

I'm creating a webapp with MS MVC3 on the back, and jquery etc on the front end. My hope is to have an attractive 'panel' based UI. At first probably a 3 panel layout like outlook's. Data will come via ajax and go into each container. Needs are:

a) Elements simple enough to easily manipulate with JQuery etc (eg size, resizability, hide/show)

b) Plays well with other JQuery widgets and plugins (accordion menus etc)

c) Nice frame around them - rounded corners or something nicer.

d) Theming would be ideal- themeroller or at least easyish CSS.

Options I've thought about:

• ExtJS - it's a pretty huge framework for my basic menu/chart/grid intended layout.
• MBContainersplus (jquery container) at http://pupunzi.open-lab.com/2009/02/01/mbcontainersplus/ for 'nice appearance', in conjunction with UI.Layout (http://layout.jquery-dev.net) for the overall layout.
• Polite (ht开发者_Go百科tp://www.trilancer.com/jpolite2/) looks quite nice at first glance, but hasn't been updated for nearly 2 years and runs on an older JQuery version.

Any experiences you can share creating a sexy multi-panel app would be appreciated. I'm more of a coder than a presentation layer person!

Thanks

Mark

Here is my take on ExtJS and JQuery.

ExtJS - Even though ExtJS is having huge capabilities, you can trim your application & library size by using the latest build tools provided by Sencha. You can go ahead with the latest MVC architecture in ExtJS4. With ExtJS, you will not be short of components for what you are developing, but I think theme-ing will require a bit of learning (it uses SASS and Compass).

Another possibility is to make use of ExtJS Core, which is striped down version of the ExtJS library. But you will have to code your way through!

JQuery UI - I would go with jQuery UI if you are looking for a very lightweight library. jQuery UI have all the components needed and you have a good theme-ing feature (themeroller!)