Development is made so much easier when you have access to open source applications and code that you can simply download and start using. You can now do this even more easily in the Developer Force community with the launch of Code Share, a directory of open source code projects built around the Force.com platform.

About Code Share

Code Share is open—projects can be connected to any public code repository, like Google Code for example, where everything is available to inspect. Code Share is also a community—a community of project leaders who have created these code projects and who lead their development, of project members who help code the project and develop new features, and of users, who deploy and use the code. As a result, anyone can create a new project—and of course some will be better than others—but with your votes, bug fixes and contributions the cream will rise to the top!

Project in Code Share

Although we’ve just launched Code Share, there are already a number of projects. Here’s a taster.

• Force.com for Facebook, Force.com for Amazon Web Services and Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs contain the source code for some substantial toolkits that interface with Facebook, Amazon and Google.
• Salesforce Android is the start of a Google Android mobile application for connecting with the Force.com platform.
• Google Checkout provides basic code for integrating Google Checkout with salesforce.com taking advantage of the Google Checkout Polling API. This could be even more intriguing with Force.com Sites!
• TwitterForce is an Apex class library for accessing the Twitter API, easily posting Twitter updates, or reading the timeline direct from Apex.
• sfdc-web2anything help you generate web forms for the live collection/insertion of data in any standard or custom Salesforce.com object.

So if you want to create your own open source code project, participate in an existing one, or simply use code from a project, head on over to Code Share.

What about Code Samples?

Code Share is all about collaboration – about building open projects that solve problems. It’s not the place for a small piece of code that solves a problem (even though that is useful!). In other words, right now – all of the projects point to larger, collaborative code projects.

But sometimes you have a piece of code that you do want to share. So what now? Well, I don’t have a final solution for that yet, but in the mean time we have the Code Samples wiki page. There are already a couple of samples there, so check those out too. We will work towards a more consolidated approach in the future. In the mean time, please use the wiki for those code samples.