LightN -- A Light-weight Network IDE Engine
Let's become a blot of lightning. 😂
I'm going to start an independent project to deliver a light-weight IDE for SDN high-level programming.
Why Light-weight?
There are several projects (NetIDE etc.) to produce the NetDevOp environment based on some popular but complicated IDE frameworks such as Eclipse and IntelliJ. Our team also made some attempts. DevOpen is our first work. It is based on Cloud9 online IDE framework. But in its life of half a year, we have found many shortcomings on it. And we realize that Cloud9 may not be a good solution for our requirements. We have started another two projects (an IntelliJ-based SDN programming plugin and a web-based NetDevOp dashboard) to make better user experience.
But we just want things easier. If we can deliver a very simple tool to maintain the whole lifecycle (or more flexible workflow) for NetDevOp without the complex IDE framework, that will be a very fancy work. We are going to discard any existing popular IDE framework but just deliver a single command-line tool. It is independent of any IDE framework. In other words, you can make it work with any IDE framework if you want.
How to Achieve It?
We just deliver a single command-line tool to achieve this goal. And in the first alpha release, it only covers the following features:
- CRUD a profile of an existing SDN controller from a built-in database.
- Network application workflow:
- Create a network control application from the template.
- Build an application.
- Deploy an application into an SDN controller.
- Host a temporal web server for real-time monitoring and open the web browser to display it.
- Network test environment:
- Docker/vagrant based test SDN controller.
- Docker/vagrant based virtual network engine.
- General purpose test framework for network scenario.
Initial Design
Usage: lw-netdev <command> [<args>]
These commands will be supported by the first alpha release:
controller Manage profiles of SDN controllers (add/list/info/update/delete)
add Add a profile for an SDN controller
list List all profiles of SDN controllers
info Show the detail information of an SDN controller
update Update the profile of an SDN controller
delete Remove a profile from the database
app Maintain the lifecycle of network application project (create/build/deploy/test)
create Create a network application project from the template
build Build the application
deploy Deploy the application to an SDN controller
test Run offline test for the application
monitor Start a web server to monitor the state of a controller
test Commands for a general purpose network test framework
define Define a test case from the template
run Run test cases from a profile or configuration file
report Generate the test report
utils Some utility tools
tracetree Visualize a trace tree from a file or a connected Maple controller