With Helium, its second code release, the OpenDaylight Project is taking more of an à-la-carte approach toward distributing the software.

The Hydrogen release, which launched in February, came in three different packages, also called release vehicles. One was a base version of OpenDaylight, and another was a bundle targeted at service providers, for instance. And the results were, well...

"We took our best guess at distributions, and by all accounts, we got it wildly wrong," says Colin Dixon, a Brocade employee who's on the OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

An proposal floated in June suggested five release vehicles for Helium — but by then, the TSC was already leaning in another direction: using Karaf.

Karaf is an Apache project defining containers sit a layer above the OSGi bundles that OpenDaylight had used for creating the Hydrogen packages. With Karaf, users could pick the high-level features they need and build their own versions of the controller. In fact, the TSC plans to eventually create a check-box web form for doing just that.

A user interface project called dlux, sometimes spelled DLUX, will help as well. Standing for OpenDaylight User Experience (stare hard, and you'll get it), dlux is an improved user interface for the OpenDaylight controller and other components — one that's decoupled from the controller itself. The result is a more modern and portable interface that's easy to add to, Dixon says, adding that the combination of dlux and Karaf "has made shipping OpenDaylight-based stuff much, much easier."

OpenDaylight's Helium release was launched today. For more details and a diagram of the release, see here.