Two New OSS Library Releases from QuickenLoans

Today is our annual Core Summit.  The teams led by Keith Elder are showing off what they’ve created for the rest of us to use, and Keith made a couple of really exciting announcements about some of our core libraries–QL Technology has now open-sourced two of the frameworks we use to build our amazing applications!  We’ve pulled out all the proprietary and internal-use-only bits, leaving all the core goodness you can use to “engineer to amaze” also.  While Keith is still attending to his duties at the summit, I thought I’d provide a small amount of clarity on what we’ve done.

One note: QuickenLoans hasn’t been part of Intuit since 2002, we just have a long term agreement to use the name.  Please don’t ask me about TurboTax, QuickBooks, etc.  However, if you need a mortgage, I’ll be more than happy to get you $500 back at closing and refer you to the best bankers in the business, just ping me.

Rock.Framework

The name is a tip-of-our-hats back to our original name, Rock Financial (in 1999, Intuit bought Rock Financial and rebranded it as QuickenLoans, then sold QL back to the original Rock Financial group in 2002).

Internally, we use RF for serialization, queue-based messaging, service creation, centralized logging (don’t see your favorite provider–please contribute!) and dependency injection, all of which are now open sourced.  We have a bunch of internal extensions which we won’t release, and you should also do the same for your applications.  The Core, Logging, Messaging and DependencyInjection libraries are all available as different nuget packages, so you can pick and choose as you need.  DI deserves a special shout-out, since Brian Friesen has been speaking for years on DI and has created a wonderful library.  Brian’s XSerializer XML serializer (so flexible, such fast, much XML) and our JSON.NET wrapper also have their own packages.

Scales

QL has dozens of websites, all of which need to comply with our look-and-feel standards.  Based on holidays and promotional events, the look and feel may need to be updated throughout the year.  Yay, CSS updates!  For those, Dave Gillhespy developed Scales, which allows you to easily standardize your UI elements across your responsive web applications (be it one, or many).

Scales uses SASS for a CSS preprocessor, and implements a number of best practices and simplifies a bung of pain points.  Scales right now is available as a Bower package, but nuget and other options coming in the future.  If you’re interested, contribute themes, enhancements and help resolve issues.

At QuickenLoans, we use a lot of OSS tools, and we’re committed to giving back to the OSS community.  You’ll see blog posts and conference sessions from many of us at QL Technology.  Meantime, follow the team members below for announcements and the latest info.  And if you’re really interested in engineering to amaze, let me know, at the time of writing we have a lot of open positions.

Thanks due to: