Ida by LIGL – A React-powered PWA

Articles|HÃ¥kon Underbakke | about 4 years ago

What is Ida?

Ida by LIGL is a Norwegian progressive web application, which I helped develop in React. The app features several juridical processes which are fully customisable, to easily allow the user to create his or her own contracts and documents.

https://ida.ligl.no

Humble beginnings

Ida started out as a simple web app I wrote in vanilla JS. I first started working on this in 2017. The app lacked code-structure and was really hard to maintain, but it worked fine. We eventually decided to re-write the app into an Electron-app, so that it would feel more like a standalone app and so that we could make the DOM harder to read for would-be copycats.

From Electron to PWA

The benefits of having a centralized PWA hosted on our servers, and using React to gain control over our code-structure made maintaining the app a lot easier. The biggest benefit in our case was that PWAs allow us to automatically update the app for all users, without the need for a complex update server system, or worrying too much about local builds on users computers.