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Product Reviews Surround SCM Meets the Challenges
Product Reviews Surround SCM Meets the Challenges
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Looking for a change management tool that can handle a sizeable cross-platform development effort? Surround SCM should be on your short list to consider. This product contains just about every CM feature you can think of, and scales to handle large numbers of files and users just fine. I worked with a late beta of version 3.1, and was favorably impressed. Surround SCM lets you run its clients or servers on Windows, Linux, Solaris, or Mac OS X. They're all first-class citizens; you have your choice of GUI or command-line clients on all platforms, and the clients and servers can all talk to each other via TCP; you only have to open up a few ports to enable SCM around the world. I looked at the Windows version, which comes with a JRE to handle the included Guiffy java-based diff/merge utility. Setup installs both a license server and the actual SCM server (unless you already have a Seapine license server on your network from another product such as their TestTrack Pro bug-tracking solution). Getting licenses, users, repositories, and main branches set up is fairly straightforward, though you’ll want to read the documentation carefully to avoid frustration (for example, you may find yourself with users that can’t log in if you skip a step). Branching in Surround SCM is easy and intuitive. There are four types of branches:
Most users will do their work in a workspace branch, and then promote tested and satisfactory changes to a baseline branch. You can set security on a branch-by-branch basis (indeed, role-based security throughout Surround SCM is pervasive and extremely granular). You can also rebase a branch, which merges changes from a parent back to a branch - ideal for updating your own private workspace with the latest changes that others have promoted. You can perform all of the standard source control operations directly from the Surround SCM client, including get, view, edit, checkout (with or without an exclusive lock), checkin, label, history, and diff. You can also group adds, checkins, removes, and renames into changelists. Changelists are executed as a single atomic transaction in the underlying database. If you’d prefer to work in your own IDE, they support integration with Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, JBuilder, CodeWarrior, Eclipse, and more Another well-designed part of the product is the ability to attach triggers to just about any event that could possibly interest you. For example, if you need to monitor when files are added to a particular repository, you can set up a trigger that fires on any add event. Triggers can send e-mail, and it’s simple to edit the e-mail template. They can also run arbitrary command scripts. This makes it trivial to set up scenarios such as continuous integration where you want to kick off an entire build after any checkin on a particular branch.  Surround SCM makes it simple to set up an amazing variety of triggers Other features you’ll find here include a set of reports to help managers monitor activity within a repository, an analyze utility to double-check your database for problems, and user integration with LDAP or Active Directory servers. Version 3.1 adds some interesting new features to the mix. Graphic file handling is better than any other product I’ve used personally; I especially like the ability to do a visual difference of versions of images, either as side-by-side pairs or a pixel-by-pixel difference. A new conversion utility allows importing a CVS repository. Other new features include the ability to undelete users in the Seapine License Server and the ability for a user to hide all snapshot branches (useful if you generate nightly builds and don’t want to see them all in your day-to-day work). Seapine’s documentation is superb. You get separate Acrobat files for the installation, License Server, the CLI version of the client, and the GUI version of the client. There are also integrated browser-based help files that you can call up from the user interfaces. You’ll find hundreds of pages of information here, which explain everything in thorough detail. If you know nothing about configuration management you’ll probably want some other reference to teach you the concepts, but when you know what you want to do this documentation is great. Visit the Seapine Web site for more information, resources such as sample triggers and integration examples, and a spot where you can sign up for a 30-day trial to see how well you like it yourself. Costs Surround SCM can be purchased either with named license pircing starting at $595 per copy or you may purchase a floating license starting at $1,495. Company Contact Seapine Software, Inc. 5412 Courseview Drive, Suite 200 Mason, OH 45040 Sales Email: sales@seapine.com Support Email: support@seapine.com Web: www.seapine.com Tel: (513) 754-1655 Toll free: (888) 683-6456 Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD .NET, MCDBA is an independent software consultant and author working in eastern Washington. He's the editor of ADT Magazine's Developer Central newsletter and the online Daily Grind (www.larkware.com), and the author of numerous books and articles. You can reach him at MikeG1@larkfarm.com.
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 12 January 2006 04:22 |
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