Home Depot: Building With Objects
(CommunicationsWeek; 01/12/98)
It turns out that home improvement isn't Home Depot's only strong suit. The
home improvement giant is making Internet application construction as easy as
applying a fresh coat of paint.
Home Depot is pioneering use of distributed object applications, some
fronted by Java. The object foundation-based on the Common Object Request
Broker Architecture (CORBA)-is a key IT initiative, as one of the fastest-
growing retail chains in the country looks to use the standards-based objects
to link together disparate systems. These systems include mainframes, Unix
servers, transaction- processing systems, PCs and planned network computers
and kiosks as the basis for a massive intranet.
Analysts said Home Depot's commitment to objects in general is unique, in
part because retailers have lagged the financial and telecommunications
industries in adopting component technologies.
"I haven't talked to any retailers on this scale," said Karen Boucher, a
vice president at the Standish Group, a consultancy that specializes in
distributed computing and object-oriented software environments.
None of the CORBA-based systems is in production, though Home Depot already
has two Java applications up and running.
"One is a reporting system for district managers that gives statistical
information about the stores, and the other is a touch- screen application
that lets customers apply for a job in the stores," said Michael Anderson,
director of information systems for the Atlanta-based chain. The job
application system, which was installed in one store in December, will be
rolled out to hundreds of locations this summer.
Indeed, that one application is a classic example of why companies are
moving toward centrally managed, component-based infrastructures.
"We have around 600 stores, and we're adding another 133 this year,"
Anderson said. "So we're hiring an enormous number of people, 200 per store."
Home Depot expects to have 1,000 stores in the Americas by the year 2000.
The aggressive growth plan demanded a convenient way to locate job applicants.
Home Depot had built a client/server version of the in-store job application
system, but it was difficult to maintain. With Java, "the appeal to us was in
having a graphical user interface, and something that was supportable in the
long run and reduced training costs," Anderson said.
It took less than two months to write the code for the self- service job
application system, "and it was the best quality system we've ever had here,
because Java prevents a lot of errors," Anderson said.
Interest in object computing is on the rise among IT organizations, partly
because of the rampant interest in Java, itself an object-oriented
programming
language.
According to a recent report by the Cutter Consortium, at least 75
percent
of IT organizations are either exploring or using object technology.
The
study, which involved 200 companies and was co- sponsored by the Object
Management Group, found a smaller but still significant number (35
percent to
40 percent) making major investments in an object-oriented
infrastructure.
The Standish Group has quantified a dramatic rise in the use of
Object
Request Brokers (ORBs) as a middleware framework. ORBs are growing
at an 82
percent compounded annual growth rate, from a $136 million market
last year to
$817 million by the end of the decade. Even with the growth, these
solutions
will continue to represent a small portion of the $3.7 billion
middleware
marketplace, dominated by OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing)
monitors.
In Home Depot's IT shop of 360 developers, about 25 are already
working on
object development projects and 86 more are taking classes. "Our
goal is to
ultimately train everyone in this, since the operating system
isn't the issue
anymore," Anderson said.
The Java applications at Home Depot are part of a larger CORBA
initiative.
Anderson said the company was not religious about its choice of
a distributed
object model, and that it also evaluated Microsoft's
Distributed COM.
Home Depot is using a Java application development,
deployment and
management system from Novera Software Inc. Last year, the
home improvement
giant signed a 10-year agreement to use Novera's Epic
development and
deployment system, including the vendor's Java application
servers, which can
run on any platform running a Java virtual machine. It
permits any Java client
to reach any Java server running on any of Home Depot's
multiple computing
platforms.
The Novera system takes an object and compiles it, adding
all the elements
necessary to hook into a CORBA infrastructure. At that
point, the developer
simply sets securities and permissions, effectively
restricting the use of the
object to users, groups, machines or times of day.
Novera's Epic also uses a directory based on the
Internet's LDAP standard
so that users are authenticated through a common
directory service.
Although Novera adds the CORBA items to objects and
has an associated
graphical tool for creating database access
objects, it does not have a
"painter," or a tool for creating a graphical user
interface for the user.
That is not an issue for Anderson, however, who
said he is busy looking at
many Java tools, among them Borland's JBuilder
and IBM's VisualAge for Java,
for creating these user environments.
One place Anderson is not ready to go is
object-to-object communication with
his suppliers and trading partners. "Will I
let their purchase order objects
call on our inventory system objects? Not
yet," he said, noting the potential
security risk.
Although Home Depot has many applications
to deploy, its object- oriented
foundation appears to be on sound footing.
"It's not that risky, it's easy
and it works," said Anderson.
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