Box joins the open source bandwagon with new showcase
If there is a term more beloved (or used haphazardly) in the tech world besides "cloud," "social," or "big data," these days, it would arguably be "open source."
Box: How Aaron Levie and his childhood friends built a $2 billion business
Box is getting into the mix, unveiling its own open source repository showcasing at least 20 projects to-date.
Amid content and metadata SDKs for Android, iOS, Windows, and Java, more distinctive projects include the Box Anemometer (a MySQL slow query monitor) and the curiously-named Stalker, a jQuery plugin allowing elements to follow a user as he or she scrolls through a page.
Software engineer Benjamin VanEvery emphasized Box's interest in "giving back" to the open source community in a blog post on Friday, highlighting tools such as Apache, nginx, and PHP have been "critical" to Box's success.
All of our projects are required to have installation instructions, unit testing, documentation, and follow good design principles. Not only this, but looking into the future we want to ensure that our projects are healthy and always improving, to this end we also require each project have a team committed to maintaining it. Over the past half year, we have been piloting and refining a process to assure that all projects we share with the world meet these characteristics. We’ve open sourced projects written in PHP, Python, and JavaScript spanning applications as wide as unit testing, systems & database monitoring, and rendering beautiful HTML5.
All of the projects are hosted on GitHub, and Box touted it welcomes any contributions.
It's been a busy time for the enterprise cloud wunderkind. Without a doubt, the biggest item on the agenda right now is the private company's initial public offering coming up.
Following months of speculation, the Los Altos, Calif.-based company filed an S-1 form in March with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Box is headed for the New York Stock Exchange with an eponymous proposed ticker name and plans to raise approximately $250 million.
On the product side, Box recently hosted its first developer day, simultaneously unveiling a gaggle of new apps and integrations intended to cater to third-party developers and partners on the cloud-based collaboration platform.
As of Box Dev Day at the end of March, Box said its third-party developer base stands at roughly 35,000 and counting.
Image via Box