We ♥ Open Source
At Teambox we're a team of passionate developers. Our software is built using web standards and open-source libraries, and we contribute often to the community.
Our history
Teambox was initially a personal project, which became popular with its second version. Teambox 2 was later released under the Affero GPL 3 license so users could host their own installs. Teambox 3 is also available under the same license. The code can be found in Github.
Over the last years, we've documented the install process for several platforms: Ubuntu, Heroku, etc. Hundreds of companies have installed our software internally, and hundreds of thousands use our online version.
The new Teambox 4
Shortly after passing the 150.000 users mark we launched Teambox 4. The new version had two goals in mind: Speed and ease of use.
We employed a team with twice as many developers and designers to work on it. We hired specialized sysadmins to run the systems and make sure everything works perfectly.
To date, Teambox 4 is built to serve millions of users, and is very different technically than previous versions. The technology stack includes nginx, HAproxy, node.js, Rails, MySQL, Redis, Resque, Cloudfront CDN, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Puppet, incoming email processes, Graphite, Sendgrid and RefineryCMS. It also has dependencies with billing and stats systems.
For this reason, Teambox 4 is not currently available as an open-source download. We will open as much as we can from it once the development is considered complete. We believe it would take at least a small team of full time developers and thousands of dollars a month in servers to get it running the way it's meant to run. We believe in delivering the best experience, and for this version that means running Teambox on our servers.
What if I need to host my own code?
However, we know many of you have specific requirements and you might be required by regulations to run your own deployment. We have plans to put together a Virtual Appliance with Teambox 4 for the rest of you who can't use it online. It will be available in Spring 2012. Ask us about it if you need it.
How can I customize my Teambox 4 environment?
Teambox 4 makes it possible to add your own Apps on both teambox.com and your own instances.
We are working on an Apps API that will give you full access to Teambox: frontend AND backend. The Apps API will give you access to a REST API with all resources and a JS API to create your own applications inside Teambox.
You will be able to design your own apps and allow others to install them as well. If you want to learn more about this, get in touch with us.
Our contributions to the community
Through our work we have contributed a lot of code to the community. Some of them are on Github. Others include:
- Patches to open-source frameworks like Ruby, Prototype and jQuery.
- Releasing Teambox 2 and Teambox 3 as open-source projects.
- Immortal, a Rails gem for undoable deletion.
- Trimmer, a Rack endpoint to make templates and i18n available in JS
- jQuery.preventMacScroll, to prevent unwanted scrolling on Mac.
- jQuery.localStorageTextareas, to save drafts for textareas.
- Google Calendar API v2, a Rails gem.
- Mock server for Rails.
- Refinery copywriting, a plugin for the CMS.
- Refinery routes, a routes plugin for the CMS.
- Hubot-Talker, a bridge for Hubot.
- VCR Remote Controller, a testing library
- Choices, a gem to help set local configuration options.
- Backbone.Aggregator, add elements to different collections.
- Backbone.Subset, subsets for Backbone.
- Free file icons, with hundreds of extensions.