Delivering Your Digital Vision

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Three Advantages Mobile Point-of-Sale (POS) Delivers

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As we announced earlier this week, we are collaborating with long-time customer, Urban Outfitters, Inc. to develop a mobile point-of-sale (POS) solution for their stores. With a strong focus on delivering a differentiated customer experience, the mobile POS application will bring many advantages to Urban’s retail floor. I thought we’d highlight three here:

1. Optimized Customer Service

The Apple Store located just minutes away from Starmount’s offices here in Austin is constantly packed with people. Especially on a hallmark day like today with the release of the iPhone 4, customer service has to be rock solid. Not only can a store associate demonstrate product and answer questions, but they also have the ability to search inventory and close the sale all in the same spot where you might have first walked in to tinker with a new toy. For a retailer like Urban Outfitters, this personalized service will be extended to quickly and easily help their customers find items, clothing and shoe sizing, and more. No longer will customers be obligated to wait in line at the register to find or pay for an item. Personalizing how store associates interact with customers will set the in-store experience apart and truly optimize the many touch points where service is advantageous in the purchase decision process.
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Free your ARTS Domain Model from aging technology

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Complex enterprise applications can become trapped on outdated technology due to the cost and complexity of porting to more advanced technology. Breaking free of aging technology isn’t easy, but for retailers this problem has been made a lot easier to solve. This article shows how to quickly build the persistence layer for an application from an ARTS (Association of Retail Technology Standards) compliant database schema.
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Implementing I18N relationships with JPA

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I have seen quite a bit of discussion about how to address database relationships that involve a base table and an internationalized (I18N) table with JPA. The difficult issue with this relationship is that from a database perspective it is a typical One-to-Many, however from an application perspective it is a One-to-One with the locale determining which row from the I18N table is returned with the base table. This article describes one possible solution for addressing this problem.

From what I have been able to determine, there is no specific support in JPA to address this. There is a mechanism in OpenJPA but the locale is fixed so it can’t be changed dynamically at run time. With the lack of native JPA support for I18N, I decided to develop my own strategy for tackling the issue.
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