What is Plastic SCM
Plastic SCM is the best Distributed Version Control supporting task-driven software development for teams of any size because it simplifies branching and merging.
It works the way you want!
- Fully distributed or centralized repos
- Branching and merging made simple
- Powerful GUI or straight command line
- Reliable & scalable repo storage with the RDBMS of your choice
Who is it for
Plastic SCM is for developers who love the freedom of simple, distributed branching and merging. It's for management personnel who need to lead distributed teams and understand the status of the project. It's for release builders who need to create stable releases.
Plastic SCM is the only version control system that can meet the demands of globally distributed development. It easily scales within any sophisticated development environment, without friction or complexity. It's SCM made simple.
What makes Plastic different
Three key aspects of Plastic SCM's architecture make it superior to other systems:
- It has excellent support for task-driven parallel development.
- It's a true distributed version control system (DVCS). Code branches can be replicated to multiple sites graphically with a single click.
- Awesome graphics, providing visualization of data and procedures that greatly simplifies even the most sophisticated version control operations.
Some of our customers
Benefits of using Plastic SCM
Graphical tools
The graphical tools help you to visualize the changes you make. Because your code is constantly evolving, it's very important to see where changes happen, where they come from (even exploring remote locations) and what code got into a given release.
The distributed Branch Explorer is a complete and interactive representation of the evolution of your project, able to display the changes happening in remote servers together with the local ones. Get the remote changes from your colleagues and merge them with yours just by right-clicking. And this is all in a single diagram offering a global view of the fully distributed environment.
A second tool we have made available is the graphical diff, or graphical display of changes made inside a given changeset, branch, or label.
The graphical three-way merge tool, our third major graphical tool, uses moved code detection and Xmerge to ease conflict resolution after refactors. It combines the source contributer revision (your co-worker's work), the destination contributor revision (your work), and the closest common ancestor revision (base revision) seamlessly.
No more broken builds
We enforce the release-early/release-often agile best practices and avoid broken builds forever.
Using task-driven development, you get continuous integration on steroids: validate changes before breaking the build instead of reacting once it is broken. Avoid bug propagation!
Thanks to our awesome branching and merging, you can isolate tasks in their own branches and avoid developers being negatively impacted by their colleagues' mistakes. Since tasks are short-lived, you merge them together to form releases often, following agile release protocol.
Plastic SCM is designed to support thousands of branches through its DAG-based architecture.
Fearless refactor
Plastic SCM tracks and merges moved and renamed files or folders perfectly. No more problems using branches and refactors together.
Our awesome branching and merging support ensures that everything is in the repository and that files added, removed, renamed, or moved are correctly merged between branches.
Support distributed teams
From remote offices to single developers working at home, Plastic SCM is a fully distributed system that lets you replicate your code seamlessly between repositories.
Plastic SCM servers can replicate complete or partial repositories and, since the servers are very lightweight and installed in less than a minute, you can have your own partial or full copy of the code you need right in your computer.
Don't let the version control tool control you
You control the tool. With Plastic SCM 4.0 we introduce Transparent SCM so you don't have to tell the SCM what you are doing. Most other products on the market don't let you make changes to files directly in Windows Explorer, but with our software, you can move files around, rename, change, add or delete them in Windows Explorer, and when you are ready to commit your changes (or check in, as we say), Plastic SCM will detect all the operations you performed and display them. You can check them in with one simple click.
Reuse components
Thanks to the new Xlinks technology, you can now easily reuse libraries and other shared components between projects just by splitting them into repositories and mounting them on the needed folders.
When you have to modify the mounted component, we provide automatic branch expansion, so you keep working transparently and your changes are safely recorded in a separate branch that doesn't affect other users of the component. Of course, the new branch can be seamlessly merged when you are ready.
Interoperability with other systems
Plastic SCM 4 supports the fast-import/fast-export interchange format to communicate with your existing version control system, making migration - or even co-existence - a walk in the park.
Furthermore, Plastic SCM integrates with IDEs, editors, issue trackers, and many third-party tools.
