Sonar, like every respectable open source project, comes with a thriving community and a vibrant ecosystem built around it.
The community features four separate mailing lists to discuss everything Sonar:
A dedicated issue tracker to track Sonar development and submit tickets can be found at the following URL:
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SONAR
A comprehensive documentation wiki maintained by Sonar's team members can be found at:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/SONAR/Documentation
The official Sonar blog can be found at:
http://www.sonarsource.org/category/blog/
Additionally, Sonar has a strong presence across social networks:
If you want to learn more about Sonar or even write your own plugins for the platform, Sonar's plugin ecosystem in combination with a friendly and welcoming community provides everything you will need.
You can subscribe to the developers' list, request access to Sonar's source control management system Forge, and benefit from the continuous integration environment that has been set up to serve development needs by navigating to the following URL:
Sonar was founded in 2008 by SonarSource S.A., a Swiss company that brought forth a bold statement:
SonarSource S.A.: democratize access to software quality management
Thus Sonar was born, in an effort to fulfill the company's objective to create a platform that would enable easy and continuous access to code quality metrics. The big picture was the platform to achieve such high adoption rates, capable of establishing it as a commodity in development teams along with IDEs.
The company did not only succeed, but pushed things further with the introduction of the Continuous Inspection paradigm similar to the Continuous Integration practices, a movement that is now considered to be a best practice among development teams and members especially in the context of an agile environment.
SonarSource, since its inception has jolted the software industry, creating an innovative platform that caused significant impact as long as quality management is considered. In comparison to other tools, the Sonar platform was revolutionary, inventing a new method towards quality inspection, which later became a standard practice under the term Continuous Inspection. Therefore, in 2010 it received the Jolt Productivity Award for providing a manager's best friend with highlights on the detailed dashboard, the tracking of historical data, and code analysis from different perspectives.
After initial versions of the platform were publicly released, Sonar was presented at numerous JavaOne conferences and was recommended as the tool of choice to measure, track, and gain access to code quality data. In most cases, the platform was sitting next to a Hudson/Jenkins build server in a continuous integration setup.
The Sonar platform is open source and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3, the most widely used license for free software. This means that you can modify and redistribute the platform freely as long as all software and modifications released still remain under the GPL Version 3.
Apart from the core platform and the free plugins developed and gardened by the community, SonarSource company offers commercial products built around the extensible Sonar ecosystem. Worth mentioning is the SQALE plugin, a full implementation of the Software Quality Assessment method based on Lifecycle Expectations. If you want to learn more about this method you can point your browser at http://www.sonarsource.com and navigate from there to the plugins section.
Additionally, among other services, SonarSource company offers professional support carried out by Sonar's core contributors and accepts requests to develop plugins on demand in case additional functionality is required.