This article is a guest post by Vishal Shah. Vishal is a Technical Analyst at Tatvasoft with experience of 4.5 years. He has an extensive understanding of multiple application development frameworks and holds an upper hand with newer trends to strive and thrive in the dynamic market.
Table of Content:
1. Introduction
2. What is SonarQube and how does it enhance the code quality?
3. What is SonarLint and how does it enhance the code quality?
4. SonarQube And SonarLint: The main difference between these two tools!
5. SonarLint vs SonarQube: Which one will you pick?
Introduction
As time is passing, the software world has developed so many tools and technologies and the software has evolved in size and complexity. With each development, the number of lines in our code increases, however, because of that, the code quality usually suffers.
Code is often duplicated and written across modules, or you might have one of those code developers who are not great at remembering the code and follow the agreed-upon configuration when it comes to defining member variables considered in the one meeting which was held years ago.
Guaranteeing that a codebase is developing specific quality code guidelines isn’t a new issue. Source code analysis for language or quality issues is often attributed to linting, issued by the computer scientist Stephen C. Jones in 1978 through porting Unix to a 32-bit machine.
While current compilers do surprisingly good work of getting some of the quality issues and errors that only linting tools will notice, these tools have grown to match up with the times.
Although the best tools out there are SonarQube and SonarLint from SonarSource. It’s been a significant member in the open-source and commercial space, and it has stayed in the software world longer than we have anticipated.
For better understanding, I went through several blogs of SonarLint and SonarQube, and the post from TatvaSoft caught my eyes; they have explained the basics of these two tools simply.
Moreover, it also helped me to draft this post, as while reading through that blog I wondered what is the difference between these two despite having the same origin. So I hope before you contemplate the difference you would understand the tools.
Both tools are best at integrating with the SonarLint IntelliJ plugin for examining code quality while it’s running, and integrating with SonarQube via the SonarCloud contribution for code analysis and tracking code quality issues across all of the organization’s projects.
Using these tools will assist you to preserve the source code quality during the development process. Therefore, it decreases the price of ongoing development and the expense associated with resources. Remember, simplistic and sincere source code executes everything more naturally.
Let’s find out the difference between these tools, but before the battle of SonarLint vs SonarQube, we will have a brief understanding of these two tools, what they are, and their main features.
What is SonarQube and how does it enhance the code quality?
SonarQube enables all developers to write code that is more precise and safer. You can also follow an Open Community that has over 200k developers teams. Numerous automated Static Code Analysis rules, preserving your app on various fronts, and managing your team.
SonarQube matches with your current tools and pro-actively supports a hand when the code quality or security of your codebase is in danger.
SonarQube Features:
-
- Write Clean Code
- Detect Bugs
- Multi-Language
- Centralize Quality
What is SonarLint and how does it enhance the code quality?
SonarLint is a free IDE extension that allows you to resolve coding issues before they start
to appear!
Like a spell checker, SonarLint depicts the Defects and Security Vulnerabilities while you
write code, with clear remediation direction so you can retaliate them before the code is even
done.
Beyond modern IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, VS Code) and modern programming
styles, SonarLint encourages all developers to write code better and in a safer way!
SonaLint Features:
-
- Instant View
- On-the-fly Detection
- Smart Education
- Push Notifications
- Connected Mode
Let’s explore the difference between SonarLint vs SonarQube!
SonarQube And SonarLint: The main difference between these two tools!
SonarLint exists within the IDE such as IntelliJ, Eclipse, and Visual Studio. Its goal is to
provide immediate feedback as you write code. For that, it focuses on what type of code you are supplementing or updating.
SonarQube is a primary server that prepares full code analysis activated by the different
SonarQube Scanners. Its mission is to provide a 360° perception of the code quality of your
project. For that, it examines all the source lines of your plan daily.
Both SonarLint and SonarQube depend on the corresponding static source code analyzers
and several of them are written utilizing SonarSource technology.
It should be reckoned that SonarQube also offers scans with a third-party tool like findBugs, checkstyle, PMD. On the other hand, SonarLint does not cover those. I think the goal is a prioritization on completion and findBugs depending on java byte-code.
Through your verdicts in SonarLint and SonarQube can modify, if the underlying condition form practices third-party scanners.
SonarQube is a server where you can receive your plans and perform code analysis, whereas SonarLint is a tool that enables us to relate with SonarQube and perform the analysis remotely. SonarLint can be practiced with IDE or can also be done via CLI instructions.
SonarLint carries its collection of error rules but when equated to SonarQube, users can send rules from SonarQube which are really over just a regular set of commands. We can combine PDM, CodeStyle, and several other checkers on SonarQube and build custom rules.
Two facts you should know are that SonarLint will never acquire those custom commands from SonarQube, secondly, Sonar doesn’t run on Test classes.
SonarLint vs SonarQube: Which one will you pick?
So far, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg, as there is a whole big part of SonarQube, SonarLint, and SonarCloud to give.
In the next phase, we should combine these tools into your software development lifecycle utilizing your build system.
Run the analysis tools before sending source code, and lead the analysis through regular builds. To develop more durable, maintainable, and reliable applications, we must have a prospect of our current issues.
We at ‘Trending in Testing‘ would like to thank Vishal Shah for sharing his views on this topic and for contributing his article to our website.
Follow Mr. Shah on LinkedIn and Twitter.
