Problem:

Trade to Travel, an online luxury property exchange, wished to update their website to a new look and feel, including adding responsive design for mobile support, without changing their legacy database and content management solution. Additionally, the client wished to leverage technology in order to automate the trade transaction, allowing for transparent, trackable, and archival conversations through any modern web browser on any modern device including mobile phones.

Solution:

V! Studios produced a new, responsively designed web application with an integrated user-to-user messaging system without altering Trade To Travel's (TTT) legacy application. V! Studios' innovative solution not only kept the legacy application and database intact, but also provided TTT with a high-availability, scalable, cloud deployment. To achieve this, V! Studios worked with TTT to develop user stories which guided priorities for weekly Kanban based sprints. Beginning with rough wireframes, TTT feedback was integrated into our agile development process, leading to more refined mockups, working prototypes, and finally continuous delivery to Development, Stage, and Production environments. Prior to deployment, we held “train the trainer” sessions for TTT staff, and provided system-level documentation.

To assist with creating a new look and feel for Trade to Travel, V! Studios created a cloud-based retheming engine that intercepts user requests to the legacy back end system and automatically replaces the old content theme and layout with a brand new mobile-friendly skin before delivering the webpage to the user.

In order to assist Trade to Travel with the task of automating property exchanges, V! Studios leveraged their V! Message product, a cloud-based service that serves as an electronic exchange enabling two parties to negotiate directly while preserving the email privacy of the participants.

Approach:

To provide TTT with the best solution, V! Studios focused on a first-class responsive design, fully tested it on all popular browsers and mobile platforms, then integrated the site with social media offerings including LinkedIn, FaceBook and Google+. Our software stack was deployed on the AWS cloud using open source technology including Ubuntu, Nginx, Python, and PostgreSQL. The V! Team used GitHub as a code repository and we used commit hooks to run our unit and integration tests. Our CircleCI continuous integration system ran our tests and invoked AWS CodeDeploy to deploy updates to the cloud instances. Our DevOps team built the cloud infrastructure using “Infrastructure as Code” tools like CloudFormation, and this code resided with our application code, ensuring tracking of all configuration changes to the infrastructure.

Result:

V! Studios succeeded where two prior companies failed in implementing a new website deployment with a member-to-member messaging system without altering the legacy application.

Trade to Travel is now able to provide customers with a modern, updated look and feel with mobile support, while keeping their legacy back end database and content management system. By choosing a retheming engine in lieu of performing an entire ground-up rebuild of the site in an entirely new CMS solution, labor hours were kept to a minimum and this project was completed in less than a month. During the entire upgrade process, the client was able to maintain confidence that their data and legacy system would remain untouched.