Here's a silly little demo of the TableFilter behavior class. This is also using tablekit to provide row striping and the sorting stuff (and the demo has this because the project I pulled it out of does, too). Basically, you attach the TableFilter behavior to a input box in a th cell. You can pass it two optional arguments: the first a function to use to stripe the rows after they are filtered (if you need such a feature), the second argument controls whether or not the filter is live or reliant on the user hitting "return" (live is the default, pass false to disable that).
(click icon or hit enter to filter)