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.
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.