I’m currently building a PWA. It’s a student/tutor portal for an educational institution. I’m using Auth0 for authentication, and then pulling data from Insightly CRM to build a series of unique dashboards.
Students might be part of a number of learning pathways. And there are plenty of levels of administrative complexity too, with students, tutors, mentors, organisation representatives and administrative staff all needing different levels of access.
The initial prototype has been tested by the internal team, and is being offered to the first bunch of students later this week. It’s exciting to put something like this out in the wild. It’s a tool which brings together complex datasets and will ultimately make the whole organisation easier to manage, as the number of students and courses offers grows over the coming years.
One thing I hadn’t considered in advance was wrapping the PWA up as a native app and making it available via the app stores. For Android it seems that can be taken care of via a thing called Bubblewrap these days.
Back in the day I dabbled with PhoneGap, which became Apache Cordova. I never really got it to work properly, but glad to see these tools are still available, for those of us who don’t build native apps. NativePHP looks like a great option too, I’ll definitely be exploring that at some point.
I’ll share more about this specific project once it’s out in the wild and being used a bit more widely. Feels great to be developing this kind of platform, building useful software which serves a specific purpose.
