I'll take responsibility for the confusion from the tutorial.  I
received erroneous direct information about the status of NOX, which
was corroborated by seeing the last update to the unstable branch done
3 months ago, leading to the mistaken belief that NOX was no longer
actively _developed_ (albeit clearly community-supported).  A
clarification is on its way to tutorial attendees - 60+ of which were
just introduced to NOX - and I've updated the tutorial docs.

As a NOX user and Python fan, I'm glad to hear about these new
developments, and look forward to future releases of NOX and POX.

Thanks,

Brandon Heller

-------------------------

Responding to:

Murphy McCauley jam382 at nau.edu
Fri Oct 21 14:46:01 PDT 2011

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
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