Intuit Partner Platform team blog

IPP Flex Framework released under the Eclipse Public License on code.intuit.com

The Intuit Partner Platform team is proud to announce the release of our native IPP Flex Framework under the Eclipse Public License on code.intuit.com. The IPP Flex Framework project provides client libraries, tools and examples for Flex developers who are developing Native IPP applications. This includes the Kingussie framework and other components that may be built over time.

Kingussie is a library that uses the Adobe Cairngorm framework to provide a model-view-controller implementation optimized for interactions with the Intuit App Center, including several pre-coded views for common tasks all IPP developers need to do. Using this framework, nearly all of an IPP developer’s coding work will revolve around creating views (GUI) and specifying data variables in the model.

Code.intuit.com is home to a number of Open Source projects that provide client libraries and tools for IPP. Most of those projects have grown organically from developers with a common need.

We believe that it makes sense that Kingussie be developed and distributed under the same terms as those other libraries and tools. Kingussie is the best example of the ideal developer framework for IPP and as such, we want the patterns and techniques used to be studied and copied.   

Intuit developers already maintain this code base as part of their day to day jobs and that won’t change. The difference is that they will now be doing that using an open source model.

We expect that by working in the open, the Kingussie developers will have closer and more frequent interactions with IPP Application Developers. But the support model for Kingussie and the IPP native Flex Tools won’t change. Members of the Intuit Developer Relations team will continue to be the primary contacts for IPP application developers using the IPP Flex Tools.

Getting involved and how contribution works

As in all code.intuit.com projects, the source code, binaries, bug tracker and documentation is freely available. If you want to get more deeply involved, visit the project and start by asking questions in the developer discussion forum. You can find the project at:

https://code.intuit.com/sf/projects/ippflexframework

The Project Administrators (Peter Vogel, Robert Larson) have responsibility for granting access privileges in the project. This includes granting commit privileges to "contributors". The "contributors" in the project have responsibility for the code base including reviewing contributions for acceptance. At this time, the project “contributors” are all members of the existing Intuit IPP team.

Project contributors can commit changes directly, subject to peer review. All others must submit patch files which will be reviewed and integrated by the team if they are accepted. Developers must follow the standard code.intuit.com process for becoming a committer as described in:

• The code.intuit.com Terms Of Use
• Committer Guidelines

Getting real with code.intuit.com

Last June when we launched code.intuit.com, we had a big vision but we really didn’t know what would happen. Open Source is new to Intuit and isn’t fully ingrained in our DNA yet. It has been a fun project and over the last couple of months we are starting to feel that we are approaching an inflection point in terms of adoption and utility.

We recently launched our Azure IPP SDK project as an Open Source project, we are seeing more contributions from Intuit teams, and we are seeing more of the components used in production (or moving their way toward production). One example in particular makes us confident that we are on the right track.

Tim Hobson and I are the primary maintainers of the IPP Java Developer Toolkit on code.intuit.com. The IPP Java toolkit provides Java client bindings to the IPP APIs. Toward the end of last year, Tim took a first cut at adding support for Intuit Data Services (IDS) support to the toolkit.  He laid out the patterns and implemented an initial IDS Sanity Test. If you don’t know, IDS is a set of REST services that integrate with QuickBooks data.

A few weeks later, on our mailing list, we see this discussion topic posted by Brian Harper of smartsheet.com. Brian is the VP of Development at Smartsheet (and yes he codes too). Smartsheet has a really cool collaboration and work management app that they were federating to the IPP cloud. Brian wanted to use our IDS integration but he thought the Exception Handling was, well, kind of weak. He also quickly realized that we really only had the basic framework for IDS support in place.

Brian could have walked away, but he didn’t. He joined the project and with some pointers and direction from Tim and I, fleshed out the initial IDS implementation. Here is a verbatim quote from Brian:

“Having access to the source code for the IPP Java Devkit enabled us to quickly identify areas of functionality that were missing or incomplete, and thanks to a good tool set and the incredible responsiveness of the IPP development team, we were able to fill in the missing pieces with a minimum of effort and schedule impact.”

Long story short, smartsheet went live on the Intuit App Center in February, the IPP Java Toolkit is more robust and the next team to use it will have a smoother path. That is the way it is supposed to work.

Moving to the Eclipse Public License

A few days ago I blogged that we will "most likely" be moving to the Eclipse Public License as our preferred license on code.intuit.com. The "most likely" disclaimer is being removed. We will be moving to the EPL.

Our lawyer is back from vacation and earlier today we got together with some folks in the Eclipse foundation to discuss the differences in the licenses, tactical details for transitioning to the EPL.

We also had a quick discussion about the formal state of the CPL on the Open Source Initiative web site. If you look at the OSI site today, you will now see that the CPL 1.0 is officially listed as superseded.

What is Next?

There is very little difference between the CPL and the EPL so as a developer using code.intuit.com software, there should be no real impact. However you should read and be familiar with the terms of the EPL.

We have some work to do on our side to switch over though. That includes:

• Notifying contributors of the license change
• Updating the general information on the code.intuit.com web site to support the changes
• Establish new projects under the Eclipse Public License starting now
• Update the existing CPL projects and code to the EPL license

Doing the nitty-gritty work of changing license headers files will need to be scheduled on a per project basis so we will be transitioning projects as we can over time.

If you are interested in tracking us, we'll be coordinating with the project administrators and discussing the details in Project Admin Forum.

What did we learn?

As a company that isn't known for it's open source contributions we are taking a big leap with code.intuit.com. We are learning as we go and we were not quite sure what the reaction to code.intuit.com would be. As it turns out, we have received a lot of good will and help from people that have more OS experience that we do. That has been very, very cool.

We also learned that, even as Open Source newbies, we have a voice. When we told folks at the Eclipse Foundation that the OSI site said nothing about CPL being superseded, voila, it was fixed.

Transparency and open collaboration. That's what it is all about and that is what we are striving for.

CPL, EPL and License Proliferation

Hi... I'm Robert Larson, coder and community manager for the new code.intuit.com  - yeah...I'm the guy you see in that video :-)

When we started getting serious about sponsoring an open source community on code.intuit.com, one very critical decision was which license to use. Although we've generally had very positive feedback and interest with the new open source initiative since our announcement yesterday, we have heard some questions around the license we selected for the code.intuit.com. We wanted to let you know why we chose what we did and where we are heading...

Why CPL?

There are a number of business friendly open source licenses to choose from cataloged by the Open Source Initiative. For a number of reasons we settled on the Common Public License (CPL). We felt that the CPL license aligned well with our business strategy, and specifically that it requires the shared responsibility and indemnification. That makes sense for an open source (but commercially oriented) community as the one we are trying to establish.

While we did consider more liberal licenses such as an MIT license, it came down to the long term intent. We want the code in the code.intuit.com projects to be the foundation of a community supported infrastructure and we believe that CPL is the most appropriate license for that goal.

CPL Superseded by EPL? Ok...

We made that decision in the February timeframe - License Selected, check!

We then went to work to make sure that our code was clean, we had the right copyright notices in place and a process in place for accepting contributions - Code Ready, check!

Unfortunately, we were so busy, we didn't notice that CPL is being superseded by EPL. The two licenses are very close, as the above link says,  "the licenses effectively differ by about one-and-a-half sentences".

Reduce License Proliferation

We want to do our part to help reduce license proliferation. So...the net update is we will"most likely"* be moving to EPL directionally and converting things over to EPL as we get the opportunity.

*Our OS patent lawyer is on vacation, so I need to say "most likely".

Announcing code.intuit.com - IPP Open Source Community

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.