Microsoft’s Edge Development team has launched a new website linting tool, Sonar, which, the company says, is an evolution of the legendary static scan tool from 2013.
Sonar will lint and scan the websites on the scale of the modern web development paradigm and help developers build complex websites with the maximum possible ease.
Here are the key features of Sonar, as per the company
blog,
“Sonar brings many improvements compared to previous scanners: execution of website code instead of static analysis, a more flexible and modernized set of rules, parallel test execution, integration with other services, a completely open source code base from day one, and more. Additionally, sonar can also be used as a command line tool (CLI) that you can integrate directly into your local web development workflows.”
This is worth noting that the Project Sonar was previously donated to the JS foundation so as to make it more accessible and enable the interested developers to help build a robust and more efficient web scanning tool. Well, this has proven to be a good move from Microsoft because now, sonar is capable of helping the users to write complex websites more conveniently. Sonar has become more powerful as an open source command line utility. Users can now install it via
npm also.
Not only this, the company informs that “it has an open-source online service, deployed on top of Azure, using docker containers, that can scan any publicly available website. sonar’s rules are backed by a collection of best practices for the web, with links to more detailed documentation that keeps growing with each new rule. Rather than just telling developers what was wrong, sonar had to also say why. It is important to know the reason for an issue so developers can decide if that really applies to their work. “
Additionally, the tool has been made compatible to integrate with other existing services and tools, such as - aXe Core, AMP validator, snyk.io, SSL Labs, and Cloudinary. Also, the company has revealed its future plans for Sonar which include building a Visual Studio Code plug-in, configuration ability for the online service, and setting new rules for better performance, accessibility, and security.