The office is a-buzz with activity! There was a similar scramble around the Norex office during the course of the Beijing Olympics when one of the developers became frustrated that there was no easy place for him to check the medal counts. At an Olympic pace, this developer created an OS X Dashboard widget that would do just that. We deployed this widget to the Apple website and, within hours, it shot up to the number one downloaded widget with the “Staff Pick” seal and all. This was the perfect idea conceived at the perfect time.

With just one week before the Olympics this year, some more side-project fun was stirring about within the development team. We were going to make another Olympic widget, but this time bigger and better. One big obstacle we had to overcome was a new cross-platform requirement. When we created the Olympic Widget for the games in Beijing there was a single platform for consuming the data feed and to expand the application; we needed to be everywhere.

Former Olympian and Norex co-owner, Julia Rivard, is camping out at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics this year as a technical trainer for the Canadian athletes. It was Julia’s idea to try and develop the widget as a Windows Mobile 6.5 application that would run on the Samsung Omnia II, the official phone of the games. Having all the Canadian athletes as an initial install base is a pretty awesome advantage. This was no small under taking; we’re all Mac and Linux guys whom haven’t touched the .NET world since our post-secondary education. However in true Norex style we made it happen.

Stemming from this idea, many of our employees have Google Android devices, so it was natural that we would want our medal counts no matter where we were. So we rolled out another version of the Medal Counter for the Android Marketplace, which is receiving a lot of great press.

The next towards becomming as platform independent as possible was to extend our Google Web Toolkit (GWT) code to compile to more than just the Dashboard Widget. As it stands currently, all of the client code for the Dashboard Widget, iGoogle widget, and the raw feed interface (plus the original version of the Windows Sidebar Gadget, before it’s Sidebar API improvements) are all compiled from the same GWT code-base. This makes rolling out updates to most platforms as simple as possible.

The entire server side is powered by Java on Google AppEngine. We saw this as the perfect place to deploy an application that needed massive scalability for pennies a day. The Appspot domain averages a load between 60 and 75 requests per second from across the world, and maintains an unbelievably low response time even during medal events; when folks get into a browser refresh frenzy to see if their country was victorious. This average load increases daily as the word spreads about this application. We are seeing very organic growth; a growth that is even more astronomically successful than originally anticipated.

Thanks to all the developers at Norex who have put in our own personal time to make this project a great success! We look forward to hearing everyone’s feedback on how the Medal Counter is working for them.