Distributed software development with perforce

Putting aside all the bells and whistles, fundamentally an SCM tool is about collaboration: letting a team of developers work on a shared set of software files. Git offers simple and computationally inexpensive branching, which opens up the door to a variety of cool workflows. Git also makes it easy to collaborate across company boundaries, a common requirement in cross-functional development.

Even if physical network access to a Git shared repository is not possible, Git patch and bundle tools make sharing data simple. Perforce, on the other hand, maintains a branching record on a per-file basis, compared to a per-commit basis with Git. What does this mean? Well, for starters it creates an awful lot of metadata in the Perforce database every time you make a branch. That contributes to performance problems at larger deployments, to the extent that many Perforce administrators restrict branch creation.

The end result is reduced productivity as developers either live with less productive workflows or just start using Git on the side and figure out how to manually merge their work back to Perforce.

Perforce branches are shared, so there is no such thing as a private task branch with periodic rebasing. And sharing code between Perforce servers? Putting aside commercial competitors, why did Git beat out Mercurial and other worthy competitors? There is some value in momentum of course, and Git has it. Git was created by Linus Torvalds to solve the distributed development challenges of the Linux kernel project, and now is the standard SCM tool for Linux, Android, OpenStack, and most other significant open source projects.

And, of course, you have the full power of a vibrant open source community standing behind Git. Git is evolving rapidly to solve real-world problems, with major new features like Git LFS arriving on the scene. In the original days of Git, the GUI and tool support was somewhat lacking. This was a stumbling block for users who prefer a visual interface for interacting with their Git repositories.

Non-technical collaborators such as game artists were particularly disenfranchised. But thankfully those days are past. GUIs like Sourcetree offer a point-and-click experience and there are a multitude of shell integrations for Git. Bitbucket provides code review, merge and pull requests, forking, online code browsing, and a plethora of other collaboration tools.

Indeed, everyone from data scientists to creative agencies are organizing communities that make use of the open collaboration that Git and Bitbucket make possible. It all boils down to the type of data and the complexity of the project organization. Game developers, particularly artists, need to work with large binary objects like textures and audio assets.

Data scientists may have massive data sets comprising billions of event samples. A centralized locking mechanism is handy, and Perforce offers one. Note however that even a centralized server only offers a locking mechanism on a single branch, so relying on this feature implies that you had a very restricted workflow. The repository size problem is largely addressed by Git LFS , an extension that lets Git handle large files while delegating the actual file storage elsewhere.

The problem of file locking bears examination on two fronts. From a software configuration management perspective, Git LFS has a superior breed of file locking on the roadmap. It is also useful to think about file locking as a coordination problem. That leads to our next topic.

Game development is a classic example of a software project with multiple modules or components — the game engine, the UI, static art, video renderings, and so on. Perforce as a monolithic centralized repository can host all of these modules in a single server, and let users choose which parts to pick into their own workspace. However, this advantage is largely moot now.

Modern Git systems like Bitbucket provide easier management of Git multi-module tools like submodules and subtrees. And more importantly, large projects like Android have shown how to manage a complex project using higher level composition tools. It also aligns with modern software development best practices , which aim to use small self-contained microservices rather than monolithic projects. Indeed, Perforce even made a tool called Git Fusion that lets you extract part of a central Perforce repository as a Git repo.

How do you even do that? And is it worth the switching cost? Learn about code review in Bitbucket Cloud Create a repository Clone and make a change on a new branch If you're using command line If you're using Sourcetree Create a pull request to merge your change.

Learn branching in Bitbucket Cloud Get set up Review branching workflow. Learn undoing changes with Bitbucket Cloud git status git log git reset git revert.

Beginner What is version control Benefits of version control. Source Code Management. Why Git for your Organization Git for developers Git for marketing Git for product management Git for designers Git for customer support Git for human resources Git for anyone managing a budget. Git SSH. Git archive. Git Cheatsheet. Getting Started Setting up a repository git init git clone git config git alias. Saving changes git add git commit git diff git stash.

Inspecting a repository git status git tag git blame. Undoing changes git checkout git clean git revert git reset git rm. Rewriting history git commit --amend git rebase git rebase -i git reflog. When it comes to leveraging or applying a distributed architecture to you really need to understand which type of system you want to apply to your application.

Before even attempting to decide to which architecture your application is suited for you really need a proper plan of a conceptual breakdown. That will far outweigh any technologies or architecture you desire to use. So which kinds of distributed applications can developers create?

Let's look at a few examples. For distributed applications there are three main application architectures, the client-server architecture, broker pattern or service-oriented architecture.

Now obviously there are many ways to produce a client-server distributed application from a two-tier system to a multi-tier system with n number of tiers. Based on whatever level of requirements you need to achieve will depend greatly on the route you choose. While the service-oriented architecture SOA design is really a combination of both the broker and client-server architecture.

Before we get into exactly what different tier systems that are involved with client-server architecture, first we need to understand.

What does it entail to create client server architecture for a Java application? The simplest way to have the design of a client server architecture, is to have framework that is segmented into different tasks or workloads that are provided by either a service or a request that are either the server or the service requester client. Hence, the name client-server architecture where you have the client who on one side is creating some request in which the server acts as the function of the requests and completes the task.

In this scenario, the client is facilitating all communication with the server side therefore the client side does not share any reasons with other clients. So, what is a broker pattern? Basically, a broker pattern application is a distributed system using decoupled components that interact with each other using remote service calls. What makes broker patterns unique is the broker component, which coordinates the communication of the decoupled components.

When a client requests a task in an application, the broker receives that task or service and in turn redirects the task to the appropriate server to execute the task. CORBA is a standard practice that is defined by the object management group OMG where they help facilitate the communications of technologies for these complex systems.

SOA is a design strategy in which applications use services that are available in the network. Each of those services can be formed together to create an application. SOA does have necessary requirements of the following:. The requirements above describe the components that make up a SOA. But there are also different roles defined by a SOA application.

The roles are pretty self-explanatory but the service provider acts as producer of the information to the service registry, the service broker helps to ensure that the information from the service provider is available to the service consumer.

Basically, the responsibilities become a hybrid of both structures where the client-server now has a slightly decoupled service that acts as the broker. Not all application architectures use a distributed application architecture therefore there must be some drawbacks, right? Of course, there is and of course there are some major benefits as well. Determining those pros and cons are obvious why application architectures have so much responsibility.

Distributed application architecture provides a ton benefits to your application that include scalability, resiliency, resource sharing, flexibility, and concurrency.

Scalability is extremely important in modern day application development eliminating much technical debt by allowing teams use applications at so many levels.

Distributed applications will have resiliency, meaning applications can operate continually even if parts of your application fault.

With this architecture an application can stay running but also increase application performance by sharing software and hardware resources allowing for better overhead on a system. With many of these systems acting independently of each it allows for that flexibility of reusing a service or technology or the ability to use the right software or hardware for the job.

Lastly, distributed applications allow for consistent changes and updates so application versions are more iterative and concurrent.

This leads to better application performance and more frequent update delivery.