The context:
I'm actually developing a small web app (C#/MVC2). Users are going to use their iPhones (and probably Android phones in the future) to access it.
At the moment it's quite simple (it just shows some info and reports from our customer's ERP), and I decided to give a try at creating local webapp that the users could add to their iPhones, so that they had an icon for it and, most importantly, most files are locally cached, so that only the relevant data is obtained using json from the server.
The problem:
To authenticate users, a small form asks for username and password, and sends them to the server via ajax, which in turn validates the user and sets the authcookie. If the app is executed in Safari, everything works ok, but if it's executed locally (that is, in Mobile Safari directly from an icon), the server validates correctly the user, but this validation is lost when the next ajax call to recover data is made.
Does this mean that session cookies are not supported by Mobile Safari in webapps? I'm doing it wrong?
And most importantly: What's the best way to authenticate users in a local webapp that access remote data?