That's good to know - as you note, it was apparently erroneously announced at the ONS that NOX would not be maintained going forward and implied that it should not be used, even though we used NOX (as well as Beacon) in the OpenFlow tutorial session! Although I sometimes find parts of NOX to be opaque and perplexing, I still think that there's a lot of useful code in NOX that solves real problems. Rewriting all of that functionality from scratch in a new project isn't necessarily the easiest or best approach. Moreover, it's an open source project - there is nothing keeping anyone from continuing to build on it as long as it is useful, so as long as people are still checking in changes I would not declare NOX to be dead.
I also agree completely about using Python - it's a path of least resistance for quickly trying out ideas, which is a very good thing. As Frenetic and other projects have demonstrated, NOX can also provide a basis for building higher-level APIs and abstractions for SDN. I do have one question though: why not do NOX development in public? Keeping it private possibly led to misinformation and the perception that development had stalled. -Bob On Oct 21, 2011, at 2:46 PM, Murphy McCauley wrote: > This is a quick update about the status of NOX. > > While, over the past few years, NOX has gone from the only controller > available to one among many controller options, we want to emphasize that NOX > is still here and is being actively maintained and improved. > > The NOX community is largely centered around the nox-dev mailing list (which > is relatively active -- something like 100 posts per month), and consists of > a mix of users -- those just playing around with the technology (asking > questions), those actively using NOX for research or other projects > (reporting bugs), those using NOX for a commercial product, and a handful of > developers (who, we hope, are effectively meeting the needs of the previous > three groups). > > There has also been some progress on NOX that hasn't been widely discussed > yet. Specifically, there's a new branch which we're pretty excited about. It > is the biggest update to NOX we've seen so far, and it responds to requests > from the community: in particular, this release involves a streamlining of > the codebase and API, along with a sizable performance jump. We are close to > making this branch public. > > We also know that quite a few NOX users appreciate the Python interface. We > want to support these users even better. To that end, we've been developing > POX -- a new controller framework written in pure Python. We think it's > pretty quick and easy to hack on, and it is remarkably easy to deploy. It's > still under active initial development, but there are a handful of projects > using it now or that are planning to use it soon. We aren't sure exactly > when to expect a 1.0 release of POX, but it's coming along. > > In short: NOX has a thriving community of users, both commercial and > academic, and an active set of developers committed to maintaining and > improving the codebase, with bugs fixed rapidly and a fairly substantial NOX > upgrade on the way. There's even an entirely new Python-only controller in > the works to provide an even easier-to-use controller for those who want a > Python interface. The comments at ONS about lack of NOX support were > ill-informed and may have caused a bit of undue concern, and we hope this > note clarifies the situation. > > We remain interested in your feedback, stand ready to fix any problems you > find, and are excited to keep the project moving forward. > > > Murphy McCauley > Martin Casado > Kyriakos Zarifis > Amin Tootoonchian > _______________________________________________ > nox-dev mailing list > nox-dev@noxrepo.org > http://noxrepo.org/mailman/listinfo/nox-dev _______________________________________________ nox-dev mailing list nox-dev@noxrepo.org http://noxrepo.org/mailman/listinfo/nox-dev
