RushTaxOS taxEngine

RushTax, Inc., is making the RushTaxOS taxEngine available as open source. The taxEngine calculates the United States Federal personal income tax estimate, with calculators for individual states coming soon.

"We are excited about our venture into the Open Source Community with the taxEngine open source offering, and we are looking forward to participating in this monumental movement."

"This is our way of thanking the open source community for, and contributing to, the great software products which they produce. It is also a great opportunity for us to 'Pay It Forward' -- to do a favor or good deed for someone, to inspire and to educate without the expectation of being paid back."

Roger Chinchilla, President/CEO, RushTax, Inc.

Overview

RushTax, Inc. developed the original version of the taxEngine in PHP 4 for the 2006 tax year, and revised and improved the coding for the 2007 tax year. For the 2008 year, it was decided that the time was right to release the code as an open source library.

A complete re-engineering of the code was undertaken with the following design objectives:

utilize PHP 5 coding standards,
employ current Object Oriented Design Patterns and Best Practices,
minimize cross-code interaction to make it easy to use the library in an application,
remove dependencies on external libraries,
create a simple API to encourage the use of the code library in applications,
develope and adhere to strict coding guidelines so that the library remains maintainable,
make the code releasable under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

The release of this code to the open source community marks the completion of the design, implementation and internal testing phases. However, until community testing and refactoring has been completed, the code should be NOT be considered error free.

taxEngine is hosted on
SourceForge.Net.