Sorting using column names

I've seen several questions related to this but no definitive answer. I've got an AJAX sourced table, using server-side processing (large data set) and want to use column names instead of column indexes to sort by. Since I'm passing the order[i] parameters to my API, the API will have no idea what order[0][column]=2 means. I need it to read order[0][column]=salary (for example). What's the best way to do that?