I work for Norex, a web development company in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As part of our sponsorship of the 2009 ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships in Halifax (Canoe '09), we developed an application to deliver real time race results to standard and mobile web browsers. Thanks to the ability to rapidly develop and deploy a scalable application on Google App Engine, and to do so live during the event, what began as a small experiment became a huge success for Norex.

Our goal was to import instant results (directly from the timing system FinishLynx), upcoming race information, athlete bios, teams, and past race results from a system used by the race organizers, and to reformat that data for distribution to web browsers. We chose to develop in Google App Engine (with Django and appengine patch) and iUI (iPhone User Interface) frameworks. In fact, this was our first time deploying an app using any of these technologies! While we had a few weeks to build the prototype, we also had to deal with the added challenges of a varying data format and special cases that cou