I am having some trouble in my quest to build a Drupal 7 custom node based image gallery module. I've got it working, but now I need AJAX to load and manipulate comments.

###What I am doing

I've created a Drupal 7 one-image-per-node image gallery; it uses relationships, EVA and even BBQ for deep linking, when viewing the 'gallery' node, EVA feeds in the thumbs and helpful attributes, e.g. URL to full image, url to actual node. I have jQuery in my gallery node, which AJAX preloads the full images on thumb click & manipulates them for fast dynamic full screen browsing, it works perfectly! Even the BBQ deep-linking which was difficult. Some of my gallery display js code is based on http://manos.malihu.gr/tuts/sideways_jquery_fullscreen_image_gallery.html.

###Update

I am trying all angles to bring in the comments. I've added one possible solution below but am going to try and figure out some other/better ways of doing this.

I am unsure about Services & Json or the views json output module and if that would be useful to me in this situation? Would json be better to call a nodes comments?

I suppose now my question remains what is the best way to do this? Even though this is working for me now I dont think I've found the best way yet.

Well thats where Im at, once I refine this I will pull everything into a module rather than a mix of module & theme layer bits, this will be my first module that defines content types, views and well all sorts of drupal fun! Yay! lol