Retail XML sales management

Retail XML sales management

A web application built with the Google Web Toolkit for retail stores, mainly as sales management system with vastly more functionality than a point of sales application.

One of its functions is of course as a point of sales application which communicates with PIN devices, printers, displays and cash drawers. Besides that, it offers much more functionality making it a complete sales management system:

  • customer management
  • service handling
  • gift coupons
  • creating orders and quotations
  • handling downpayments
  • product returns
  • turnover reports
  • emailing customer invoices
  • … and much more.

It has its own (Hibernate driven) database which exchanges data with a SAP Business One database. A robust and multithreaded distribution mechanism can be employed to provide each store with its own database clone which is synchronized with the central database.

Despite its internal complexity and wide range of functionality, it performs surprisingly fast with a simple and intuitive interface which is well suited to multiple types of input and devices (keyboard, mouse, touch devices).

It took me a year to design and develop this application on my own, and it is by far the greatest and most complex application I have ever created.

Although today it is used in more than a hundred stores which all have an extensive helpdesk contract, it is so stable that Serac only receives a few calls a week mainly regarding simple user mistakes or hardware issues.

Project type Professional
Employer Serac
Used skills Java, Google Web Toolkit, HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, Hibernate, PostgreSQL, SQLServer, SAP Business One, database design, SOAP web services, Apache Tomcat
Timeline 2011 and 2012, functionality continuously added until today
Size 120k lines of code