So I'm working on a mobile platform application that I'd like to have users authenticate over the web. I was wondering the best way to do security. The user is sending a password for HTTP to a php server wich authenticates against a mysql database on the same server. Obviously I don't want to send the password in plain text over the internet, but I also don't want to do 2 SHA hashes.

This is what the server looks like (in pseudocode)

$pass = $_POST['pass'];

if ((get PASSWORD where USERNAME = USERNAME) == SHA($pass)) return PASS;

This is pretty standard and I don't think there's any other way to do this. But I was wondering how I should prepare the data before sending it over the internet.