Dantevios.com

The time finally came for me in life to sink or swim. After bidding on many freelance projets, I finally was awarded with my first one from a company called iGlobal. They couldn’t give me a whole lot of technical details about what needed to be done except for they needed an application of theirs modified that was written in Java. The modification was to create an XML file and send it off to another server. This all sounds simple on the surface; however, once I got into the project as I suspected it was not just a Java application. The application was a Java Servlet. All I was provided with was source code. I noticed the structure of the code was made for eclipse, so I imported the project. After resolving the dependencies though, this source code wouldn’t compile on my machine. After hours of trying to get the JSP pages to work correctly in the Jetty servlet container I was using I gave up on that idea. I loaded the application up into a tomcat container like it was running on their live site and the application seemed to work. I then remember that Netbeans had a tomcat server built into the package if you download it off their website. Netbeans tools for debugging and syntax highlighting Java servlets are also superior to eclipses. Netbeans can do things like syntax highlight JSPs and the debugger works when you place breakpoints on pages. After I got the application working, something still was not right. Again I looked to iGlobals servers to see how their application was setup. Turns our they are using mod_proxy for apache to redirect some of their traffic and I was missing some of the html, javascript, and image files that the servlet was loading. The page was now displaying correctly, but I couldn’t get the application to work still. After digging around and pulling hair out, it turns out all their links for their application were hard coded to point to their domain name. The easiest way I solved this problem was to just add an entry to my /etc/hosts file to use their domain name to point to my local IP address (127.0.0.1). With that, everything came together nicely, I was able to debug their code by placing breakpoints, and I got the job done for them. Of course in this business everyone needs everything yesterday, and especially these guys who were waiting for this so they could open up a large account. So I delivered this solution to them in 27 hours flat. They seemed very happy with my work saying:

“Jon, you rock. You can expect some excellent feedback from us on oDesk. Thanks again.”

I would like to say thank you to iGlobal! It was a pleasure doing business with you and I hope that your company prospers! They were great to work with and were able to give me all the help they could.