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Second Skin: Real-Time Retheming a Legacy Web Application with Diazo in the Cloud

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Second Skin: Real-Time Retheming a Legacy Web Application with Diazo in the Cloud
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Retheming a legacy Web Application with Diazo in the cloud
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61
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CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Our client had a 15-year old ASP/VBScript application but wasn’t prepared to rewrite it: the logic was working well enough, but it wasn’t attractive by today’s standards or usable on mobile devices. “Can’t we just give it a new look and feel?” they asked. We’ve used the Diazo theme engine to build mobile.nasa.gov, retheming www.nasa.gov before it was mobile-friendly, so we knew we could do the same for this client. Our solution for this new project was to build a modern responsive theme, tailored for their each of their different content types and sections. In this talk, we discuss our experience in building Diazo into nginx with a patched XSLT module, and how we deploy into AWS on a load-balanced cluster of inexpensive EC2 instances. We cover how our front-end developers work with paster, and our full-stack developers work with Docker. Finally, we talk about the challenges of providing too much power and splitting content control between the origin server and Diazo.