This morning we are announcing a new open source community for developers interested in creating connected online applications for small businesses. The community, at code.intuit.com, lets developers work with Intuit and each other to build better Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that solve important small business problems via the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP).
Context
A few weeks ago we announced IPP’s Federated Applications capability to provide developers the ability to write applications using any programming language, host them on any on cloud infrastructure, connect them to the Intuit Partner Platform and market them to millions of Intuit’s small business customers.
code.intuit.com is next step to developing an open small business ecosystem and we believe that by adopting the open source model for the Intuit Partner Platform, we’re enabling developers to collaborate with us to enhance their applications and the platform and Small businesses will benefit from a better SaaS experience with Web applications that work together and solve real business needs.
About code.intuit.com
code.intuit.com has been in open beta for a couple of months now and many more months in development. Now out of beta, the site hosts and provides early access to code, toolkits and documentation for the Intuit Partner Platform.
The initial Intuit-sponsored open source projects are designed to expand a shared infrastructure to make it easier for developers to integrate their applications with the Intuit Partner Platform. In the future, Intuit will sponsor additional projects and encourage involved developers and organizations to create and run their own Intuit Partner Platform-related projects.
The initial Intuit-sponsored projects under Common Public License include:
IPP Developer Toolkits: Language-binding libraries and sample code for the Intuit Partner Platform. The toolkits under development include Java, J2ME, Ruby, .Net, iPhone™ and others.
IPP Federated Authentication: Working and sample code for Federated authentication for the Intuit Partner Platform using SAML.
Princeussie for Flex: Adobe® Flex® components which extend the existing Intuit Partner Platform Kingussie frameworks.
IPP Deployer: Maven and Ant tools for deploying Intuit Workplace applications. This project is in incubation.
Third-party developers are currently contributing code to the community. VerticalResponse has provided a sample Ruby SAML gateway that enables authentication between IPP and their application, VerticalResponse for Intuit Workplace.
Alan Keller, vice president of business development at VerticalResponse provided us with the following quote over email:
“Contributing our gateway code serves two purposes. First it will help other developers integrate their applications with Intuit’s platform and bring more users to it. In addition, we expect to benefit from future code contributions the community will provide.
Everyone benefits here – developers and customers alike. We’re all working hard to develop great small business apps, and sharing code with Intuit’s developers and others can dramatically speed up development of additional features and enhancements to our offerings. And in the end, that really benefits the customer.”
Advisory Board Selected
As part of our learning and development of code.intuit.com, we’ve been engaged with leading open source experts and community members. We’re very happy to say that four of these leaders have accepted our invitation to serve as the advisory board for code.intuit.com. They are:
- Jay Sullivan, vice president of mobile at Mozilla.
- Michael Coté, analyst at Redmonk.
- C. Michael Pilato, technical lead for CollabNet’s Version Control team and leader in the Subversion community.
- Jason van Zyl, founder and CTO of Sonatype and one of the founders of the Apache Maven project.
We’d like to thank them for their valuable time and input contributed so far and look forward to their ongoing guidance throughout the community’s development.
IPP CloudJam, Also Announced :-)
Since we announced IPP Federated Applications, we’ve had an enormous level of interest from developers wanting to reach the small business market by tapping into our platform. So we are also announcing an event, IPP CloudJam (Aug. 11 - 13 at the company’s Mountain View, Calif. Headquarters), to encourage third-party developers to collaborate with Intuit on a number of open source projects and speed up their efforts to add their own applications to the platform. This is a great opportunity for us to meet with and collaborate with our growing IPP developer community. You can learn more about the IPP CloudJam here.
Links and Resources
- code.intuit.com – Intuit’s open source community for the Intuit Partner Platform.
- Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) – Intuit’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
- Intuit Workplace – Online destination for small businesses to use Intuit Partner Platform applications.
- IPP Federated Applications – Information and resources on how to integrate existing SaaS solutions to Intuit Partner Platform.
- IPP CloudJam – event and registration information
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The Intuit Partner Platform team is very excited with the overall progress we’re making and open direction we’re heading in…we look forward to your participation and feedback.
On behalf of the Intuit Partner Platform team,
Alex Barnett
Group Manager, Developer Relations, Intuit.
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