NetIDE aims to deliver a single development environment to support the whole development lifecycle of Software-Defined Network programs in a vendor- and controller-independent fashion. Nowadays, while most of the programmable network apparatus vendors support OpenFlow or other south-bound protocols, a number of fragmented control plane solutions exist for Software-Defined Networks. Thus, network applications developers need to develop again their solutions every time they encounter a network infrastructure based on a different controller. NetIDE is approaching the problem through an architectural solution, the NetIDE Network Engine (https://github.com/fp7-netide/Engine) with its Core that will allow different controllers to be used to program the network and a controller to connect to the network. The Core allows us to explore new techniques to perform cross-controller debugging and profiling of network programs; heterogeneous network programming; network programming with simulators in the loop.

Three of the industrial pertners of the NetIDE project propsed Use Cases to showcase the capabilities of the solution to fix common issues they encountered in their respective domains.

NetIDE is an opensource project licensed under the Eclipse Public License.