NetIDE: First steps towards an integrated development environment for portable network apps

Nowadays, while most of the programmable network apparatus vendors support OpenFlow, a number of fragmented control plane solutions exist for proprietary Software - Defined Networks. Thus, network applications developers are forced to re-implement their solutions every time they encounter a new network controller. Moreover, different network developers adopt different solutions as control plane programming language (e.g. Frenetic, Procera), severely limiting code sharing and reuse. Despite having OpenFlow as candidate standard interface between the controller and the network infrastructure, interoperability between different controllers and network devices is hindered and closed ecosystems are emerging. In this paper we present the roadmap toward NetIDE, an integrated development environment which aims at supporting the whole development lifecycle of vendor - agnostic network applications.