Sonar : any feedback ?

Question

Hi all,

I am currently doing a little study over Sonar and (why not) other tools to manage code quality.

I did not found the documentation much clear nor extended and I have some questions.

Does somebody know and use it ? How can one integrate sonar into a complex project ? Can we manage a Perl or C project with Sonar & Maven 2?

I would also appreciate if sombody could give me feedbacks about Sonar.

Regards, Le Barde.

Answer 1

other tools ?

I have only used Understand for C in the past, and of course lint.

Answer 2

I use Sonar and it's great. As of now, it only supports Java code, thought. From their website:

Sonar currently covers Java and PL/SQL languages. However, Sonar is highly extensible and can therefore embark plugins to cover new languages

My experience: it's great. Really. If you use java, sonar is a must-have, along with Hudson. If you doesn't, support the community and help them extend sonar to other languages. The best and coolest feature that sonar has is the time-machine stuff. It's really impressive!

Answer 3

I also recommend Sonar, we used it for several months now.

It's very easy to install and setup. We configured several projects with 500k lines of code in 2 days. We needed to:

• install sonar
• integrate it with a continuous integration server - we used Apache Continuum
• write a maven pom.xml build file for each project; it needs to do "test"
• sonar is called with "mvn clean compile sonar:sonar"

Answer 4

I just started using sonar and I'm pretty pleased by it. I like the reporting and I like the fact that cobertura just worked with no modification to my maven poms. I have one team using clover and one that doesn't. So, I'll be interested to see how it handles that.

Sonar and Nexus: I struggled with getting sonar's internal maven repository to feed into my nexus repository as a proxy. It just didn't work (not sure why, but I think it has to do with the last of browse rights on the sonar repos).

Updating my maven-settings to exclude sonar worked quickly and easily. So, I'm going to use that in place of getting nexus and sonar to cooperate for now...

<mirrorOf>*,!sonar</mirrorOf>

Answer 5

I use Sonar for almost 2 years now, and I really appreciate this tool.

Concerning your questions about support of none Java languages, for the moment Sonar is only focused on Java and PL/SQL (this is a commercial plugin), but will also be soon able to analyze PHP projects. In addition to that, several plugins are being developed, in particular to support C and C++ languages.

Le Barde, I see that you are french, so you could read the french manual I wrote here. I recently updated this guide, when the version 1.10 was just released!