Distributed StarTeam

<quimby>First I'd like to take this opportunity to offer equal support for all breakfast meats of all creeds in the quest for the ultimate morning meal democracy.</quimby>

Another example in this session of how the new vault design turns conventional SCM server techniques upside down. So, there are no deltas stored on the server. But, to increase performance for clients over slow links, deltas are generated by the server to send to the client if they're out-of-date or merge.

A good description for the way cache agent works at remote sites is that it's a "trickle charger" for remote teams. The cache agents are read-only, since making them writable would cause the potential for merge conditions. They send data in encrypted streams and store the data encrypted on disk. They've also added a new multi-threaded, multi-connection checkout system to try to parallelize some of the checkout behavior. There's also the ability to import and export projects and views between servers, a feature that will let us finally get rid of the old Orchid server.

Future versions will be able to cache all artifacts and metadata. You'll be able to configure each cache server to only cache certain projects (cache agent 1.0 will get all file changes to all projects, and flush files from the cache using an LRU algorithm). Another goal is to have a StarTeam offline mode that makes it act like a PDA: You get your files, work on them offline, then reconnect to the network and resync to the repository.