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Codice Software, a producer of software solutions to provide more efficiency in application development, today announced Plastic SCM, a cross-platform software configuration management tool.
Codice built the Plastic SCM (software configuration management) solution on the Mono open-source implementation of the .Net framework. Codice officials said application development teams use Plastic SCM to manage parallel development, where multiple developers work on building software at once, even from geographically dispersed locations. The product is at Version 2.0, although this is its first time being marketed in the United States.
“We built Plastic SCM from the ground up to be the mission-critical replacement for other software configuration options, many of which are open-source projects,” said Pablo Santos, CEO of Codice Software, which is based in Spain.
Santos said Plastic SCM is a flexible SCM solution in that it can be used by Java, .Net or any other developers, and it works with various IDEs (integrated development environment), including Microsoft’s Visual Studio, Eclipse and tools such as Oracle JDeveloper. And the product can be used as a replacement for other SCM tools such as CVS, Visual SourceSafe or Subversion, and can easily import branches and related data from these tools. Moreover, for larger development teams-more than 12 developers-Plastic SCM can be easily integrated with the SQL Server or MySQL databases.
“The two biggest challenges for SCM systems are enabling highly parallel distributed development, and making the state of projects visible to both developers and management,” said Joe Niski, senior analyst at Burton Group. Plastic SCM enables both, he said.
“Plastic SCM became an easy choice for the replacement of our current source control system once we saw the many features it offered, including excellent branching support, Visual Studio integration, and an optional Microsoft SQL Server back-end,” said Keith Richardson, senior Web developer at the law firm of Dinsmore & Shohl.
“Codice Software’s Plastic SCM 2.0 product makes branching affordable and as easy to do as possible for a developer,” said Vishy Venugopalan, an analyst with the 451 Group. “Easy branch creation means developers will take advantage of that functionality more often, which usually means they can maintain more separate work spaces from the larger project. Developers can potentially use these work spaces to try out technical ideas that intrigue them without fear of affecting the larger project.”