Content area
Full Text
The Home Depot. Inc
When a potential employee applies for a job at one of Home Depot's 700 stores, the application automatically goes out to all the other stores in the area. That increases Home Depot's chances of filling positions and reduces pavement-pounding for the job seeker.
The retailer plans to expand that Java employmenttracking application into a paperless benefits system. And those are only two of the many Java applications Home Depot is working on. Hoping to improve ease of use for end users and reduce client support costs, it has Javacreated applications in various stages.
Home Depot also has in place a virtual office application that district managers can use to download inventory and sales information to a local PC. Reports that used to be created by each district manager's administrator now show up on the managers' PCs when they log in. That eliminates the need for a physical office and an administrator, says Curtis Chambers, manager of distributed application architecture at the Atlanta company.
Home Depot also has an inventory management application in place and a vendor data exchange application in the works.
The company is far along with its Java development with good reason: It started evaluating Java development tools a year ago. At that time, Chambers found the pickings slim. Home Depot put products such as Symantec Corp.'s Visual Cafe, Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Java WorkShop and IBM's VisualAge through the paces and didn't like what it found. The retailer ended up going with JPadPro, an integrated development environment from ModelWorks Software in Colorado Springs that Home Depot uses for editing.
Although JPadPro lacks an integrated debugger and a screen designer, Chambers found that its flexibility makes up for that loss. "It's built completely in JavaScript, so I can customize every part of the tool," he says.
Home Depot also uses Epic from Novera Software, Inc. in Burlington, Mass., to write CORBA-compliant client/server applications using Java code. "You don't have to know anything about Common Object Request Broker Architecture [CORBA] or be savvy in Interface Definition Language [IDL],"...