phonegap ajax user authentication with nodejs-expresss-mongo-passportjs

Question

I have already built a basic node.js user authentication system based on node.js, express.js, passport-local.

I store my username and passwords in a mysql database and I use mongo for persistent storage for the sessions. I now want to move the user registration and login to phonegap.

From the tutorials I have found online, the only way that seems work is is AJAX user authentication. However I have two questions:

1. How do I rewrite the express routes to respond JSON since passport.js relies on redirects?

   // process the signup form
   app.post('/register', passport.authenticate('local-signup', {
           successRedirect : '/home', 
           failureRedirect : '/register', 
           failureFlash : true // allow flash messages
       }));
   
   
   // process the login form
   app.post('/login', passport.authenticate('local', {
       successRedirect : '/home', 
       failureRedirect : '/login', 
       failureFlash : true // allow flash messages
   }));
   
   
   and in my strategies I have : 
   
   passport.use('local-signup', new LocalStrategy({
           usernameField : 'email',
           passwordField : 'password',
           passReqToCallback : true 
       },
       function(req, email, password, done) {
   ...
   rest of the code that queries the db
   
   also for login
   
   //Configure passport Local Strategy for login
   passport.use(new LocalStrategy(
     function(username, password, done) {
     var query = 'select * from users where email = '+  connection.escape(username);
       connection.query(query, function (err, user) {
         if (err) { return done(err); 
   ... rest of code
   }

2. Will the AJAX authentication in PhoneGap work by sending a post to /login and therefore creating a new active session in the express server?

3. How do I handle state in the client. In a normal webapp you use redirects for ie. failed login attempts, logout, etc. In an AJAX authentication how do you handle that? Do you return a status code, return new markup, update part of the view?

Answer 1

I will close this question as I did some research and my original problem was from my lack of understanding of how phonegap apps are architected. I wasn't aware that I need to follow the single page app architecture vs the traditional web page model.