Buddy vs. Rocket DevOps

Springloops is the best tool for deployment to any environment. Especially, the auto-deployment feature on development servers is essential for the early stages of development. The built-in source control mechanisms are a perfect combination of ease of use and a rich feature set that allows the development team to have an easier and more complete view of each part of the project. A section that is lacking is time tracking - but then this is not the main usage of the service.

Incentivized

Rocket Aldon is perfect for simple changes to traditional IBM i development using RPGLE, CL, and DDS. It is great for finding related objects that are referenced in many locations and helping recompile all of these objects. However, Aldon has a particularly hard time with SQL views. For some reason, it is determined to lock every table related to a view even though this is not required by the operating system. Whenever one view references another view, you are always in danger of losing a view permanently if you didn't check it out and promote it. To clarify, imagine you created a view CUSTOMER_INFO. Then you make another view called CUSTOMER_SHIPMENTS that joins the CUSTOMER_INFO to a shipping table. If you ever change CUSTOMER_INFO and then promote it, there is a good chance that Aldon will delete the CUSTOMER_SHIPMENTS view and you will not get a single warning. It doesn't happen every time but when it does you are going to have a real mess on your hands.

Incentivized

• Easy of use - clear user interface
• Fast deployment to all environments
• Great combination of source control and project management

Incentivized

• Software Change Management
• IBM i development
• Object relationships

Incentivized

• We would love to have a more flexible management for resources (users, storage)
• More advanced web hooks would be a plus

Incentivized

• Check-in checkout process can be cumbersome
• UI is crowded and not intuitive
• Requires in house expertise maintain and manage

Incentivized

Apart from being a great versioning control system Springloops offers the options to automatically deploy code to multiple systems. This feature alone is a determining factor to renew Springloops over and over again. Another important factor is that it offers a full set of tools that help the team during the development cycle. No switching between time-tracking to project management. This is a real time-saver.

Incentivized

Based on current integration with our release process, we will need to keep this for the future.

Incentivized

Easy to use, automatic deployments, comments on projects are only a few factors. Multiple servers per project is another must-have feature. User permissions and rights offer granular control on access to the system

Incentivized

I rarely use it but when I need it the team is there. During the initial steps of Springloops, I had close contact with one of the founders. He provided support to me over Skype! He didn't have to but he did. We had a couple of long talks about some issues I was facing. He has there regardless of time. It was a great experience

Incentivized

Support is hit and miss. Sometimes they give some great assistance and sometimes they are no help at all. It always seems like they can't replicate the problem but then they never try to get on our system to do deeper research. It's kind of frustrating dealing with them. Also, the website isn't that helpful.

Incentivized

Springloops has a built-in feature that is lacking from Bitbucket (at least on the out-of-the-box functionality). Deployment of projects to various servers/development stages. The process is so easy and painless that even remote servers can act as local environments. This is a feature that differentiates Springloops from other solutions that require other tools to perform the same task.

Incentivized

There are not a lot of CMS solutions for the IBM i server. Midrange Dynamics MDCMS is definitely one to consider. It seems very similar to Aldon Rocket and has a lot more functionality. I haven't used it but I have been to a demo and it looks promising. It seems a lot more intuitive and the promotions seem easier. However, that was a demo environment and even then it crashed so there's that to consider....

Incentivized

• A total time saver - just commit changes and Springloops can handle the deployments
• Total control of source code and commits - you never have to think about those things again

Incentivized

• Software promotion is much easier and doesn't require custom coding.
• Developers can work collaboratively with less overlap.
• Developers can find objects faster and research code more thoroughly.

Incentivized