Dear Colin,
thanks for your e-mail.
I'm not really a developer so this might be an obvious question: using basex's http server, what is the best strategy for ajax-style communication between browser and db?
As Michael already pointed out, there is no "unique" strategy how to use BaseX with AJAX. One popular way is to use our new "json" serialization method, which allows you to directly return JSON from BaseX. A small example:
1. Start the HTTP server via "basexhttp -l" (the -l flag will communicate with the local database context; this way, no other socket connection will be used)
2. Via REST, retrieve a document or run a query and specify "jsonml" as output method: http://localhost:8984/rest/database/doc.xml?method=jsonml
This way, the XML result will be directly serialized, using the JSONML syntax. If you have created your XML documents from JSON input files, you may as well use "json" as serialization format. Pleave check out our documentation as well:
http://docs.basex.org/wiki/JSON_Functions
Feel free to ask if this is not exactly what you are looking for. Christian