I personally like Bentonville pretty well. People from larger cities often complain "there's not enough to do" but I'm a bit of a home-body myself, so that doesn't bother me. One nice thing about this area is you can get a house with 5 acres of land for between $100k and $200k that would be comparable to houses easily twice or three times as much in someplace like Seattle.

I know a little bit about JB Hunt's IT. They use COBOL and Java. They might have some other stuff, but they seem big on those two from what I've heard.