The gateway is an Open Source JavaEE application developed by the Vermont Department of Taxes . It provides a web services framework for accepting Streamlined Sales Tax registrations and returns. It also includes a web interface for manually submitting transmissions. The goal is to build an extensible framework upon which future tax services can be built. See the Getting Started Guide for additional information about the project. Currently development is underway to support Modernized eFile by 2009. Information on our MeF development can be found here .
Continuously updated information about our Modernized eFile Development is available at http://gateway.sourceforge.net/mef/ .
This release is to update a minor feature for the SST Registrations client. The ability to specify the type of request for registrations is now optional in the XML configuration file. More details can be found here.
The Gateway client suite is here! This release combines all of the Gateway clients into one single executable. Along with the centralized client structure, we have added an extensive configuration system to allow more complex tasks to be performed with multiple client modules. These modules each communicate with one Gateway-related web service, SSTP, SQL, MeF, SST Registration to name a few. Modules can be configured using a new XML format and run in series or individually. The modules can be configured and run from within the GUI or from the command line using the same executable. In addition a new application exists to simplify creating the XML configurations, though it is still under development it still provides some useful functionality. This release replaces the previous "client-sstp-gui" project which is now accessible from within the gateway-client. Navigate over to the releases section and check it out!
The Gateway team is excited to announce our interest in mentoring students for Google Summer of Code 2008. A page has been added describing the program and possible project ideas for college students. We encourage you to take a look at our proposed projects and contact us with any other ideas you may have for a summer-long projects college students. Our Summer of Code page can be accessed here , or by clicking on the link in our navigation menu under "College Students". Also see the Google Summer of Code 2008 Flyer .
The Vermont Department of Taxes has been nominated for the 2008 Federation of Tax Administrators Outstanding Technology Award. The 9 page document outlines what the gateway is, how it was developed, what problems it solved, how the Vermont Department of Taxes has given back to the community and details about the future direction of the project. The nomination can be downloaded as a PDF (380K).
The Gateway team is pleased to announce the fourth release of Gateway Monitor. Gateway Monitor is a Mozilla Firefox extension that interacts with the Streamlined Sales Tax web service. The extension's primary use is to function as a monitor. The extension periodically calls an SSTP web service's 'Ping' method and displays the results in the status bar. Several Streamlined Sales Tax implementations authenticate users before responding to Ping requests. This release adds support for OASIS Web Services Security (WSS) authenticated Pings. There are two new optional configuration settings which facilitate this, username and password. Support for unauthenticated Ping requests remains functional. The 0.4 release can be downloaded via the Source Forge File Release System: here
The Gateway SSTP Client GUI has been released with a small update to the Streamline Sales Tax schema. The "SSTPAllowanceIndicator" element in New and COU Registrations now supports the enumeration of 3 values (Y, U, N). The validation within the client has been fixed to allow these values.
The Gateway SSTP Client GUI has been released. This release contains a few valuable GUI enhancements for sending test transmissions. By allowing the FIPS code to be changed for transmissions, any state's Gateway can be tested. Also, the transmissions the client generates for testing can now be displayed on demand. The client is available in many forms from our download section, executable .jar, windows .exe/installer, and as a source archive.
The Gateway has changed a lot since the previous release. The directory structure for our Maven modules has been flattened to allow more flexibility in working with each individually. Development to support Modernized eFile has begun and many new modules are being set up. This release contains small changes and fixes across the board... Feel free to navigate to our downloads section and check it out!
The Gateway team is pleased to announce the second release of Gateway Monitor, a Mozilla Firefox extension for monitoring streamlined sales tax web services. This release adds support for Mozilla Firefox 3. It has been tested on Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 2 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11. We improved the robustness of Gateway Monitor in this release by adding additional error checking. The 0.2 release can be downloaded via the Source Forge File Release System: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148910&package_id=250446&release_id=565821 or the Firefox Add-ons Sandbox .
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.
Old news is archived here .