Intuit has launched an open source community for developers interested in creating online applications for small businesses. The community allows developers work with Intuit and each other to develop Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that are expected to solve small business problems on the Intuit Partner Platform.
Intuit said that the community is part of Intuit’s commitment to provide an open Platform-as-a-Service that enables developers build SaaS businesses. The platform’s recently launched Federated Application capability enables developers to write applications using any programming language, host them on any cloud infrastructure, connect them to the Intuit Partner Platform and market them to Intuit’s small business customers.
Reportedly, the community’s site will host and provide access to code, toolkits and documentation for the Intuit Partner Platform. By collaborating and sharing platform components, developers can build their own businesses and use the work of Intuit when building applications.
The Intuit-sponsored open source projects are designed to expand a shared infrastructure for developers to integrate their applications with Intuit Partner Platform. The initial Intuit-sponsored projects under Common Public License include: IPP developer toolkits,IPP Federated Authentication, Princeussie for Flex and IPP Deployer.
The third-party developers are currently contributing code to the community. The company will reportedly host an Intuit Partner Platform CloudJam for third-party developers to collaborate with the company on open source projects and add their own applications to the platform.
