SonarLint for Eclipse – Do Proactive Code Quality Check

This blog talks about SonarLint tool for Eclipse IDE which could be used by developers to get on-the-fly feedback for code quality issues when they are writing the code. This feature was always one of the most awaited feature of Sonar and thankfully, it’s out there for Java, Javascript, PHP developers to try it out for themselves.

Following is how one could get started:

• One needs to download and install SonarLint for eclipse within Eclipse IDE. All one needs to do is go to this page (http://www.sonarlint.org/eclipse/ ), click on “Marketplace” button which takes you to install page. Drag and drop “install” button in your eclipse workspace and it would start downloading and installing.
• Restart the eclipse and you are all set.

I tested with HelloWorld program and got following code quality assistance. Note the information such as “Replace this usage of System.out or System.err by a logger”.

In the current version, SonarLint does not support the integration with SonarQube server. The integration of SonarLint with SonarQube server would achieve some of the following objectives

• Each project would be able to set their own code quality rules (or configure rules) in sonarqube server.
• The project teams would, then, be able to validate their code using Sonar length against the rules set for that project team.

The above would help the developers avoid the code quality issues much before they appear in the Sonar dashboard.

Feel free to try it out or recommend in your projects. The downside (as I have not yet tested) is that it may slow your work because of a background task always running and checking the code quality issue. However, you could disable the run by right-click clicking on project and disabling the SonarLint.