Mobile dashboard using react and phonegap

I was commissioned by a local school to produce a mobile application for parents to track students progress and attendance at home.

The goal is to digest their information stored in their SIMS student management software and reconcile it down into a progress graph that is easy to understand at a glance. As I would be writing adapter code to extract and shape data from SIMS, it was decided to also roll in attendance statistics and tracking, as well as the schools contact details.

When we ran our initial workshop on this, it transpired that the best approach was a hybrid application, that the school staff can use on the web, and parents can view on the web or on a mobile. For this reason I identified Phone Gap as a great tool to publish a web application as a cross platform mobile app. Using this I could build one modern, responsive web application and have the Phone Gap software repackage this ready for publishing in the App Store.

When building out the mobile app I chose the React framework as the current leading light in rapid Javascript development. As a developer, I’m always interested in using the best tools the web has to offer, but I don’t like to use the latest shiny technology just because it’s there. In this case, what we want and what the client need happened to be a great fit and I had a great time building this project out!