Building a drag and drop factory layout web app

I have experience using ZendFramework 2 (php) and some basic knowledge of Javascript and jQuery.

I need to build a web application where the user has a left bar with icons, he must be able to click them and drop them into a "draw zone" where he will create a topology of a factory with the different icons he drops from the bar and connect them with arrows of different lenghts.

I only need to know how to approach this. I think that the drag and drop feature can be implemented in jQuery as I found in some questions here, but how do I save the layout? How can I create that kind of arrows that are built when someone clicks on one point of the screen and moves the mouse towards another point and releases the click?. This kind of apps are made in Macromedia flash? or they can be made using pure Javascript and jQuery?

I´d appreciate any tutorial or reading material you can suggest me.