What is the correct way to read and render post info (for ajax)

[vespillo]

Hi all,

I am looking into making an AJAX based modification for my boards that would basically just pull new posts as the user scrolls down the page (and eliminate the pagination). I'm at the very beginning stages of planning how I would accomplish this so I'm not yet ready to go into the discussion regarding performance, etc, but I do have a question I am having difficulty answering.

What would be the best way to pull post information from the database and then render it using the postbit templates for display? I have to imagine that there's an article/faq/how to that I'm missing in my searches that explains a bit better how to approach this task.

I've tried searching for info on a database abstraction layer, but the only articles are for the 3.x series, and I'm not sure how much of that still applies for the 4.x branch.

Do you have any helpful links that might get me on the right path? The alternative, of course, is to write it all myself, but in the interest of upgradability and DRY, I would much prefer to use a vB method.

Hope that is clear enough and thanks for reading