Software defined optical networks (SDONs) integrate software defined technology with optical communication networks and represent the promising development trend of future optical networks. The key technologies for SDONs include software-defined optical transmission, switching, and networking. The main features include control and transport separation, hardware universalization, protocol standardization, controllable optical network, and flexible optical network applications. This paper introduces software defined optical networks and its innovation environment, in terms of network architecture, protocol extension solution, experiment platform and typical applications. Batch testing has been conducted to evaluate the performance of this SDON testbed. The results show that the SDON testbed has good scalability in different sizes. Meanwhile, we notice that controller output bandwidth has great influence on lightpath setup delay.