Real-Time Collaborative Editing for Live Events
Events OperationsRebuilding a 4D desktop app and a separate PHP site into one cloud platform, where staff edit the same live record together in real time.
Overview
An events-operations platform used by governing bodies and venues to manage live competition data ran its core product as a 4D desktop application alongside a separately maintained PHP web app, and neither could support more than one staff member editing the same record at once. Canvas Labs Partners rebuilt both into a single cloud platform with real-time collaborative editing.
Rendering twice as fast
after the PHP-to-SPA rebuild
Real-time collaborative editing
multiple staff edit the same record at once
See who else is editing
WebSocket presence tracking shows every active viewer
Challenge
The platform's core product ran as a 4D desktop application alongside a separately maintained PHP web app, and neither could support more than one staff member editing the same competition record at the same time. For live event operations, where multiple people need to update the same record as a competition unfolds, that was a hard requirement neither system could meet.
Solution
Canvas Labs Partners restructured the 4D desktop application into a cloud-based platform, built on React and NestJS, while preserving every existing workflow the staff already knew. The legacy PHP rendering layer was rebuilt separately as a single-page application, giving the front end its own speed rather than inheriting the constraints of the original server-rendered pages.
The platform's defining feature is a Google-Docs-style multi-user editing system. Server-sent events push instant updates to every connected screen as a record changes, and WebSocket presence tracking shows which colleagues are currently viewing or editing the same competition record, so two staff members never have to guess whether someone else is already making the change.
Complex, interdependent data grids with infinite scroll handle the competition data itself, built on AG Grid for the volume and nesting the live events generate. An embedded reporting engine generates the operational reports staff need during and after an event, drawing on the same live data the collaborative editor is updating in real time.
Results & benefits
The PHP-to-SPA rebuild made the platform render twice as fast, a direct result of giving the front end its own single-page application instead of inheriting the constraints of server-rendered pages. The bigger change is collaborative: staff can now edit the same competition record together in real time, with server-sent events pushing every change instantly and WebSocket presence tracking showing who else is in the record. For an events-operations platform where multiple people update live data as a competition unfolds, the single-user limitation that constrained both the old desktop app and the old PHP site is gone.
Customer
Events-operations platform
Services
- Legacy modernization & platform re-architecture
- Real-time collaboration engineering
- Data visualization & reporting
Tech stack
About us
Canvas Labs Partners is a software consulting team that designs and ships production agentic AI systems: multi-agent pipelines, tool-calling architectures, and human-governed automation, together with the trading infrastructure, blockchain, mobile, and product engineering those agents plug into. We publish our work as a case ledger rather than a portfolio, so every claim on this site links to the engagement behind it. Engagements follow the same four-step discipline, Map, Bound, Instrument and Govern, whatever the stack, and every entry in the ledger carries a result we are willing to be measured against.
Delivered individually, in a prior role, by one of Canvas Labs Partners’ founding team members. Not by the firm itself.
Have a system like this one?
We built this one end to end. If you are facing something similar in events operations, book a free discovery call and we will tell you what it would take.