The community, at code.intuit.com, lets developers work with Intuit and each other to build Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, applications that solve important small business problems on the Intuit Partner Platform.

The community is part of Intuit's commitment to provide an open and flexible Platform-as-a-Service that helps developers build SaaS businesses. The platform's recently announced Federated Application capability gives developers the ability to write applications using any programming language, host them on any cloud infrastructure, connect them to the Intuit Partner Platform and market them to millions of Intuit's small business customers.

"The Intuit Partner Platform is creating a connected and thriving small business ecosystem," said Alex Chriss, business leader of the Intuit Partner Platform. "By adopting the open source model, we're enabling developers to collaborate with us to enhance their applications and the platform. As a result, small businesses will benefit from a better SaaS experience with Web applications that work together and solve real business needs."

The site will host and provide early access to code, toolkits and documentation for the Intuit Partner Platform. By collaborating, sharing and improving platform components, developers can build their own businesses faster and easier and take advantage of the work of Intuit and their peers when building applications.

The first 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 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, iPhoneTM 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 Contributions

Third-party developers are currently contributing code to the community. VerticalResponse, Inc. provided a sample Ruby SAML gateway that enables authentication between the Intuit Partner Platform and their application, VerticalResponse for Intuit Workplace.

"Contributing our gateway code serves two purposes," said Alan Keller, vice president of business development at VerticalResponse. "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."

Week-long CloudJam Announced

Intuit will host an Intuit Partner Platform CloudJam 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. The event will take place Aug. 11 - 13 at the company's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. The IPP CloudJam will also be available online with live webinar sessions taking place throughout the week. More details are available at developer.intuit.com/IPPCloudJam.

"We've had an enormous level of interest from developers wanting to reach the small business market by tapping into our platform," said Alex Barnett, group manager of developer relations of Intuit. "This CloudJam is an opportunity for external developers to collaborate with Intuit in a focused effort to help them bring their products to market quickly and help them grow their SaaS businesses."

Additional Resources

• code.intuit.com - Intuit's open source community for the Intuit Partner Platform.
  
• Intuit Partner Platform - Intuit's platform-as-a-service.
  
• Intuit Workplace - Online destination for small businesses to use Intuit Partner Platform applications.
  
• Federated Applications - Information and resources on how to integrate existing SaaS solutions to Intuit Partner Platform.