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
