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In the era of everything on the cloud, intern et of things and big data, the dramatic traffic growth and the evolution of today's telecommunications services are affecting the overall optical network infrastructure and usage, Whilst Wavelength Division Multiplexing systems struggle to cope with bandwidth requirements, Flexi-Grid and Space Division Multiplexing technologies emerge and promise to deliver the required capacity gain, Software defined networking on the other hand has been introduced to facilitate management and control of the network resources, All these efforts take place when the static nature of network installation and operation affects network cost and energy consumption and limits network flexibility and scalability, This is whilst building a network featuring ultra-low latency, power efficiency, flexibility, and enormous capacity has become a necessity, This thesis will explain how a number of programmable optical networking testbeds for advanced sub/super lambda optical transports were designed and developed, which were additionally enhanced with innovative controller platforms, These demonstrator networks and testbeds introduce a range of technologies and approaches to incorporate and inject programmability into optical networking infrastructure, Forwarding programmability, network hardware programmability exploiting FPGAs, and infrastructure programmability using reconfigurable optical backplane, are the main enabling technologies, which come together in various architectures and under different control planes (GMPLS, SDN) to demonstrate the benefits of added flexibility and programmability for advanced optical communications. The experiments and efforts reported in this thesis include software/hardware development, optoelectronics, network designs, and simulation studies, which are categorised and introduced subsequently and in various chapters as the work evolves towards the All Programmable Optical Network.