Walmart.com beefs up, adds open-source

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Text, News, Open Source

Walmart.com beefs up, adds open-source

by Ryan Carter (RSS feed) Oct 27th 2006 at 8:00AM

Wal-Mart has generally had a good-enough web presence online, that is for the most part helpful in finding products and priming the pump for customers to visit the store knowing what they will find already since they saw it online. I have used their website for a long time. Now, Walmart.com has had a face-lift, a make-over, and even to some extent, a make-under. Using open-source software, Wal-Mart has pulled the trigger on their reloaded web experience. New features include: the use of Flash for promotional spots and new flashy-popdown-menus to quickly find what you are looking for, which saves a lot of time having to click on each tab previously and wait for it to load. Alphabetical menus, a "what's hot" area, and logical product groupings make everything easy to find. Walmart uses OpenLaszlo and Flash technologies to accomplish this newly christened voodoo, making open-source a big component of their operation. One more thing, hub, the failed social networking experience is not a part of the new site, thank goodness. If you ask me, Wal-Mart should think about adding social product voting and interactive user comments on products. Turn the thing into a giant blog that the customer can contribute to. That would be something.

Tags: content, dynamic, flash, menu, openlaszlo, walmart, website

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Cy Fenton said 1:25PM on 10-27-2006

Just so we are not confused ...

Walmart.com (at least this most recent version that has been relatively stable and working for the past 4 years) has always run on the back of open source SW. They purchased homewarehouse.com back in the day (2000) and they were a small startup that ran on Linux and GNU Server Pages running Java on the middleware and back end. Walmart.com appears to still run it's content engine on GNU Server Pages (ie .gsp).

Interesting that THE retail behemouth is still trying to act like a startup. I don't know if it's possible for them to pull off. At least the tools are cool :-)

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