Intuit Backs a New Open Source Community

Andres Ferrate, July 27th, 2009

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Intuit today announced its launch of a new open source community at code.intuit.com. The new community is aimed at developers looking to work with the Intuit Partner Platform, which allows developers to reach millions of small businesses that use Intuit products (e.g., Quickbooks). Intuit’s Alex Barnett announced the new endeavor on the Intuit Partner Platform Blog:

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).

As Barnett puts it, Intuit is interested in developing an “open small business ecosystem” that allows developers to collaborate with Intuit, other developers, and small businesses with the goal of developing applications that address real business needs. The open source community was in a public beta until recently, and third party developers are already active working on several projects. There are also several Intuit-sponsored projects available under the CPL, including:

• 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.

Intuit’s planning and commitment to this new community are also evident by its Advisory Board. Current members of the board include:

• 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.

Interested developers should head over to the code.intuit.com developer portal, which includes a a list of current projects as well as a preliminary site wiki. We’ve also included a video below (published by Intuit) that gives an overview of the new open source community.

Lastly, be sure to check out our QuickBase API Profile, which provides information on a related resource: Intuit’s API for QuickBase programmers.