This page contains archived news stories. Current news is available on the front page .
Just a quick note to let you know that the documentation available on this site has been expanded and updated to match the code in our source repository .
The Gateway team is pleased to announce the initial release of Gateway Monitor, a Mozilla Firefox extension for monitoring streamlined sales tax web services. The extension periodically calls an SSTP web service's 'Ping' method and puts the results in the status bar. It can be downloaded and installed via the Source Forge File Release System: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148910&package_id=250446 or the Firefox Add-ons Sandbox .
Tom Cort will be giving a talk titled Starting a State Government Open Source Project at the third annual Government Open Source Conference . The presentation will focus on the mechanics of starting up an open source project in state government, using the Gateway project as an example. The talk is scheduled for October 15, 2007 @ 11:00am and is open to conference attendees. There is still time to register for the conference if you wish to attend.
Update : slides from the presentation are available here: PDF or ODP .
Update : video from the presentation is available here: MOV (112 MB), RM (stream)
Today marks the official start of the project to add support for MeF (Modernized eFile) to the gateway. We will be implementing programs for pulling tax data from the IRS, processing the data, viewing the data, and more. Our target implementation date is summer 2009. We look forward to the new and exciting challenges ahead. Anyone wishing to join our development team is welcome and encouraged to contact us via the gateway-discuss mailing list .
The Gateway team is pleased to announce the 2.0 release of its graphical SSTP Client. The Gateway SSTP Client GUI is an open source application from the Vermont Department of Taxes for communicating with Streamlined Sales Tax web services. The program also includes a visual XML data verification tool.
This version is a major re-write of the 1.1 code base. It will be much easier to maintain in the future and the Java classes will be re-used in other projects. There are only a few minor user interface enhancements.
You can find out more about the software on the project page: http://gateway.sourceforge.net
The 2.0 release can be downloaded via the Source Forge File Release System: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148910&package_id=243817&release_id=539037
The Vermont Department of Taxes is pleased to announce the 3.0 release of gateway. Gateway is an open source JavaEE application from the Vermont Department of Taxes that implements Streamlined Sales Tax web services. This release of the program also includes a web interface.
There have been many changes since 3.0_beta2. All XML data is now fully validated against the appropriate schemas and run through a new modular rule system. The back end processing interface is now pluggable, so users can connect the gateway to their own processing system without too much effort. Unit tests have been improved with the creation of a data generator. JBoss 4.2.1 is now fully supported.
You can find out more about gateway on the project page: http://gateway.sourceforge.net/
You can see gateway 3.0 running on our demo server: http://gateway-demo.osuosl.org/
The 3.0 release can be downloaded via the Source Forge File Release System: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148910&package_id=164312
The Gateway team is pleased to announce the 1.1 release of its graphical SSTP Client. The Gateway SSTP Client GUI is an open source application from the Vermont Department of Taxes for communicating with Streamlined Sales Tax web services. The program also includes a visual XML data verification tool.
This release includes extensive user interface enhancements. The biggest area of change was the data verifier. The XML data verification tool now contains a source editor with error highlighting. Previous versions only listed esoteric error messages. Additional UI tweaks were made in response to user feedback.
A windows installer, standalone jar file, and complete source code are available for download here . Installation instructions are available here . Usage instructions are available here . Configuration instructions are available here .
The switch from Apache Ant to Apache Maven was completed today. Our build system is a lot more streamlined now. The most notable difference relates to dependencies. You'll notice that subversion checkouts and source code packages are much smaller. This is due to the fact that maven will automatically download the dependencies for you when you compile the gateway for the first time. The other area of major improvement has to do with packaging. With the ant-based build system, users used to have to copy many files to the conf , lib , and deploy directories. Now with our new maven based build system there is only one file to copy, the Enterprise Archive (EAR).
Along the way, the Vermont Department of Taxes made several contributions to the open source community. A patch was written for maven-ear-plugin to allow datasources residing in the EAR to be deployed with JBoss (patch ). A developer at the Vermont Department of Taxes discovered a security hole in Apache Continuum and wrote a patch to fix it (patch ). Two new open source projects were created along the way, maven-har-plugin and maven-sar-plugin . The first allows the user to generate hibernate archives and the second allows the user to generate JBoss service archives.
Shawn Kasulka presented at The Federation of Tax Administrators 23rd Annual Technology Conference and Exhibition. The presentation was titled "Open Source Web Efile Gateway for Streamline Sales Tax Processing". If you missed it, the slides for the presentation and the handout are available for download on the presentations page.
A new version of the gateway was released today. The files are in the usual location. New Features include support for JBoss 4.2.0 and conversion from MyFaces to JSF RI. The custom tags have been re-written to use the new Unified Expression Language. A demo mode was implemented and benchmarking tools were created. There are a few new ant targets written for packaging release files. We solved an exception in that was happening in putJobAcknowledgements and we fixed IE 7.0 browser bug. You must upgrade your JBoss installation to version 4.2.0 or this version of the gateway will not function properly.
The Oregon State University Open Source Lab has kindly donated some server space for us to host a demonstration of the gateway software. The site is intended to let interested parties explore the web portal without having to download and install the gateway. The site also provides third party application developers with a place to test their applications. You can access the site at the following URL: http://gateway-demo.osuosl.org .
The gateway now runs on JBoss 4.2.0. The code and configuration files have been updated in the subversion repository. The documentation has been updated on the website. JBoss 4.0.X is no longer supported. We've also switched from Apache MyFaces to the JavaServer Faces Reference Implementation.
The first release of gateway is available here . We also have a Press Release .
Another milestone was reached today. We've made the gateway source code public. It can be accessed through our subversion repository. In the coming days we will be posting Documentation for building and deploying the application. A formal release will be made sometime in the next few weeks.
Today marks the birth of this website. The site is running WikkaWiki, a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Please be patient while we are constructing the site and preparing the source code for public release.