| Feature |
Subversion |
Plastic SCM |
| Visualization tools |
Subversion provides with a limited number of visualization tools such as a graphic version tree on which display the relations between different versions of the history of item. |
Plastic SCM provides with new-generation interactive visualization tools to improve both developers and managers productivity and performance, as well as increasing visibility of the development’s evolution. Plastic Branch Explorer provides with an updated view of the state of the development for managers to be aware of the situation of the project at any time, and it also eases the work of integrators and developers on managing development tasks. The Statistics tool offers a transparent and effective view of the development areas which are being more often modified. |
| Distributed Support |
Subversion does not support distributed mode. |
Plastic SCM supports distributing “parts” of its repositories to other servers, so they can separately evolve and merged together afterwards. Every operation is available on the distributed repositories, providing with an ideal scenario to maintain teams working on parallel from different locations or for developers working disconnected from their laptops. |
| Usability |
Subversion is quite easy to use but it does not provide with the required features for assisting teams on a parallel develpment environment. There are third-party tools which provide with some of these features but each of them is a combination of a different set of characteristics. |
Plastic SCM provides with complete graphic user and command line interfaces, offering its full set of functionalities on a consistent manner. Furthermore, Plastic´s Branch Inheritance technology, Branch Explorer and 3D version tree simplify parallel development to an even greater extent. |
| Support for real parallel development |
Subversion does not support complex parallel development, which is nowadays, a must for any size company. It does not even provide with merge traceability, resulting on developers having to deal with very complex integrations and wasting their time trying to solve them. |
Plastic SCM implements Branch Inheritance technology, which includes complete traceability of merges, and it provides with powerful visualization tools which ease the merge process to a great extent, enabling real parallel development through specific branches for every task, providing the best scenario for task per branch development. |
| Refactor support |
Inaccurate management of moved, renamed and added files when integrating between branches turns very often into a release which cannot be compiled. |
Plastic SCM full project’s structure versioning ensures that refactor operations (move, rename, add...) are versioned and integrated on branches at the same level as they are on files. The integrations with IDEs (Visual Studio, Eclipse and JDeveloper) are in charge of properly propagating refactors into the version control. |
| Analysis and reports |
Subversion does not have a query interface, even though there are third party tools which provide with certain query ability. |
Plastic SCM offers an extensive query tool which is an integrated part of the system, directly automated through the command line interface and supporting the most widely used standards such as XML. Additionally, Plastic SCM supports widely used database backends such as MySQL, SQL Server or Firebird, which provides serialized reporting and data-mining options. |
| Installation, maintenance and security |
Subversion requires manual configuration in order to use authentication against Active Directory or LDAP. Permit support is limited to read/write. |
Plastic SCM seamlessly integrates with Active Directory, LDAP or NIS and includes the required configuration by default to start working in 3 minutes. It also provides a security mechanism based on ACLs for every system object. |
