On the server side do I have 2 hashes I encode into JSON strings like so
my $j = JSON->new; $j = $j->utf8; my $data; $data->{users} = $j->encode(\\
You should use jQuery.getJSON() as mentioned at http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/.
There is also $.parseJSON() method to parse string to json if you want to go that way.