[pox-dev] Announcing the betta branch! (and POXDesk code too)

[Murphy McCauley]

The betta branch is POX's second branch. It's named after the genus of fish, perhaps the most well known member of which is the rather pretty Betta splendens (do an image search for "betta" if you're not familiar; it's worth it).  This branch is based off my POX fork which has been slowly accumulating changes for a while now.

What does it mean that there's a new branch?  Well, the short of it is that this is kind of like POX's second version.  For a bit more detail, here's a note from noxrepo.org about how branches/versions work for NOX/POX:

> Branches fall into two categories: active, and released.
> Active branches are branches that are being actively
> developed. Released branches are branches which at some
> point were chosen as being a “new version”. The most
> recently released branch continues to get worked on, but
> only in the form of bug fixes -- new features always go
> into the active branch.

It's still pretty early days for betta, so it should still be considered like an "unstable" branch.  Things may still change quite a bit.  For example, the messenger has changed really significantly (this is actually the third major rewrite -- the second one was never public), and so far it hasn't had many users, so it may yet need significant redesign.

If you don't need the "stability" of the master branch, I do suggest that you try to switch to betta.  It has some bugfixes, some cleanup, some reorganization, and some new features too.  Moreover, it's where any active development on POX itself should be taking place.  A specific new feature I should mention (because people have asked for it a number of times!) is that it has a webservice interface for doing some basic querying of switches and even pushing of flows.


As a sidenote, I've also made POXDesk public on my github.  There's a post that mentions POXDesk on noxrepo.org if you're interested; if you haven't read that, POXDesk is a really, really early personal project to build a POX web GUI.  My hope is that it'll eventually be a good starting point for application-specific GUIs in POX as well as a good tool for teaching/debugging/tutorials/etc., but it has pretty literally just been slammed together out of some old code, some new code, and some random keyboard mashing.  So don't get too excited yet, and be forgiving about how much of a terrible mess the code is and how utterly lacking it is in documentation. :)

-- Murphy