Lipstick On a Pig (+Audio)
Dynamically skinning a legacy portal using Python, WSGI (the Python Web Server Gateway Interface), and Deliverance.
So you have a big legacy portal application which you want to change the look of, but are contractually not allowed to touch?
Here is a case study on how we used the power and flexibility of Python and WSGI and the wonder lxml to dynamically re-skin a proprietary .NET portal without even touching it.
We take a giant lump of messy invalid HTML markup and dynamically strip it back, add semantic markup and CSS and present the user with a nice svelte valid site.
I will cover the history of the legacy portal, the problems encountered, our cunning plan to dynamically re-skin the site, a technical overview of the parts of the system (lxml, WSGI, etc), and what we learned along the way.