Clients, Collaboration, and Security

In addition to its core offering of products—​the Helix Versioning Engine and the Helix client applications—​Perforce offers a number of tools and software packages that allow you to analyze your data, enhance collaboration on your coding projects, and seamlessly integrate Helix into interactive development environments.

Client applications

Helix client applications include the following:

  • A command line interface available for all platforms.
  • A GUI interface for Mac OS X, UNIX, Linux, and Windows.
  • Integrations, or plug-ins, that work with commercial IDEs and productivity software.

Collaboration

Using the Helix Swarm and Helix GitSwarm collaboration tools, your team can work together effectively on complex and extensive sets of data and code.

Helix Swarm

Helix Swarm is a web-based collaborative tool for small to medium teams sharing code and assets. It provides functionality to review, comment upon, and approve changes to code and assets. Using Swarm, you can customize projects, memberships, and reviewers.

Helix Swarm helps you review code before or after committing it, bring continuous integration into the review, and merge work that passed the review. It integrates cleanly with JIRA and Helix Jobs, and provides an API for the development of custom extensions.

Helix GitSwarm

Helix GitSwarm is Perforce’s code review solution for Git users. Built on the open source product GitLab, it includes Helix-specific enhancements to support both Git and Helix code reviews. It allows users to push their code, review others' code, comment, and track issues.

Helix GitSwarm offers a pure Git-based workflow and an intuitive web-based UI. In addition to keeping your Git-based projects in Helix, GitSwarm allows you to mirror content from repositories in other popular tools such as GitHub and GitLab. It also allows you to restrict who can see what projects, as well as providing other security mechanisms. In addition, it provides issue tracking and project Wikis.

Integration

Helix includes two types of integration plugins: plugins for integration into interactive development environments and plugins for build and reporting integrations.

Interactive development environment integrations

  • The P4VS plugin embeds the power of Perforce Helix features into the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE.
  • The P4Eclipse plugin integrates the strengths of Perforce Helix with Eclipse’s powerful IDE.
  • P4Connect, the Perforce Helix Plugin for Unity, enables you to perform Perforce Helix operations directly from within Unity.

You also have access to many community-built integration plugins, which are summarized on the Perforce website, on the Helix Clients & Integrations page.

Build and reporting integrations

Helix offers three main build and reporting integrations: one for the Jenkins build system, one to replicate from Helix into a SQL database, and one providing an FTP interface to the Helix Versioning Engine:

  • The Jenkins integration allows Jenkins users to use Helix repositories directly. The plugin makes it simple to pull code, automate reviews, apply labels, and so on.
  • The P42DB integration replicates Helix metadata to open source and commercial SQL databases.
  • The P4FTP integration allows FTP-based HTML authoring tools such as Dreamweaver to access files in Perforce Helix depots.