Who we are

We are the developers of Plastic SCM, a full version control stack (not a Git variant). We work on the strongest branching and merging you can find, and a core that doesn't cringe with huge binaries and repos. We also develop the GUIs, mergetools and everything needed to give you the full version control stack.

If you want to give it a try, download it from here.

We also code SemanticMerge, and the gmaster Git client.

Want to switch from ClearCase, this is what Plastic has to offer

Friday, May 11, 2012 Pablo Santos 1 Comments

Okay, today instead of a deeply technical merging speech, I'll be on the "value proposition side".

Since I'd like to be as practical as possible, what I'm going to do is to copy, the reasons that one CC user sent me a few weeks ago. I think they're the best possible marketing speech.

Here it goes: We already use branch per task in ClearCase, and I see clear advantages in Plastic:

I think it is quite important to highlight that teams using ClearCase UCM tend to hate the whole thing, while it is taking longer for hard-core CC users to run away...

Let's now go through the main reasons to consider Plastic instead of CC:

  • No messy config specs anymore: (component selection is done via Xlinks, just work in the repo and branch at will)
  • Atomic commits (so no broken merges half way through)
  • Branch creation is lightweight, compared to CC, which is not as slow as others but not as fast as Plastic either
  • Can easily and quickly swap workspaces between branches
  • Branch explorer gives simple overview of where work is being done and makes merges much simpler to execute
  • Merges are much faster (as a side note, some of our biggest setups are merging thousands of files that used to last for... hours!)
  • Merges can be backed out (practically impossible with CC)
  • No complicated admin
  • Live backups
  • Support for multi-site with no added cost
  • You can install local servers for distributed development
  • Much faster to load a workspace (compared to CC snapshots – not as fast a CC dynamic views, which is instantaneous, but they're rubbish on Windows once you try to build)
  • Faster to checkin/checkout
    Pablo Santos
    I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
    I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
    I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
    I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
    And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.
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