I want to use jQuery's ajax functionality in a DotNetNuke module I'm developing.

I want the ajax call to be authenticated via DNN's membership functionality.

I want the ajax response as json.

How can I do this?

I've looked at IWeb and IWebCF -- it's not clear to me from much Googleing and scanning the forums whether these modules would allow me to create a web service that would accept a simple post request and return json (seems like they want to do it the ASP.NET AJAX way with a generated proxy, I'd prefer to just use jQuery's AJAX call functionality).

Seems you can't create a simple webmethod in a DNN module (since they are developed as User Controls (.ascx)).

I could deploy an .asmx file with module, but that won't leverage DNN's authentication system.

Ideas?

I'm currently developing against DNN 4.9.5