Moodle accessing settings from JavaScript

I'm very new to Moodle dev. I have read the basics of the API, and now started getting my hands dirty by making tinymce plugin. While doing so, I have encountered the following problem: How do I access settings.php from javascript. I know how to access lan/en strings from javascript, I also know that in php, ```$layout_string = $this->get_config('statlayout');```, will exract the setting 'statlayout'. What I want is to access ```$layout_string``` from JavaScript.