8 ms·

Open-sourcing Sonar, a new extensible debugging tool

202 points by emilsjolander 8y ago

kodablah 8y ago
I rarely comment on name ambiguity because there is rarely overlap, but this does overlap a bit with the Sonar CI analysis tool IMO. Reading this post, I can create a Sonar plugin with Java? OK, let me Google "Sonar Java plugin"...
- tromobne8vb 8y ago
  This is even more unfortunately named than the Spark Web UI project.
- hliyan 8y ago
  FB developers couldn't possibly not know that they would be polluting the test tool namespace with this one...
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    Let's release a face recognition and database application called Facebook.
- oceanghost 8y ago
  There's also an app called Sonarr.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    A usenet based app :)
  - boomskats 8y ago
    Don't forget Cakewalk
- neves 8y ago
  Hey People from SonarSource: https://www.sonarsource.com/company/history/ https://www.sonarsource.com/company/history/ please file a lawsuit against Facebook. It looks like it is necessary to prevent them to use these confusing names.
  - robodale 8y ago
    Not a lawyer, but this looks like an obvious Trademark name dilution scenario. Facebook, change that Sonar name.
- mkempe 8y ago
  This is so confusing. My immediate reactions were a) but Sonar is already open-source! b) did Facebook somehow acquire Sonar? c) oh, they're actually polluting the name space.
- aylmao 8y ago
  Didn't they rename to SonarQube though? All of SonarSource's products are named Sonar.*, which is unfortunate but in theory there should be no collisions on a Google search.
khanan 8y ago
Worst... name... ever... Hello SonarQube.
- romwell 8y ago
  Hello Cakewalk Sonar (a popular DAW)[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk_Sonar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk_Sonar
- cocacola1 8y ago
  Or Sonarr.
kbd 8y ago
The attached video only supports mono audio in the left channel. Evidently no one involved in this release process listened to the video with headphones. Stuff like this is always humbling to me, that you can have a big release with dozens of people involved yet mess up something simple.
- vjeux 8y ago
  Sorry about that, it has now been fixed
sonar_un 8y ago
I agree. There are way too many projects with the name sonar in them. There needs to be a rebrand.
artosispylon 8y ago
I use this tool every day at FB and it's awesome. I highly encourage you to try it and see if it fits into your workflow!
- tomstockmail 8y ago
  Glad to hear the tool works well for FB employee's. As always the contribution to the community is much appreciated. But as others have pointed out, the tool name could use a rebranding. The popular SonarCube is just one example where confusion can arise.
  - avarun 8y ago
    Facebook has been using it internally for a long time. It would make no sense for them to rename the tool for open-source release just because a naming conflict exists, unless you'd prefer they just not release it at all?
    - koko775 8y ago
      It can and has been done multiple times in the past - AsyncDisplayKit -> Texture is the one that immediately comes to mind as it happened after open-sourcing.
    - asdsa5325 8y ago
      Actually, it makes perfect sense to rename it.
    - qznc 8y ago
      Why not? Google renames every internal tool they release as well. E.g. Blaze -> Bazel and Rietveld -> Gerrit.
      - cjhopman 8y ago
        > Rietveld -> Gerrit That's a bad example. Gerrit is not a new name for Reitveld, it's a totally new implementation (with similar inspiration). And both of those were publicly released under those names. Your underlying point is quite true, though.
kilon 8y ago
I agree unique naming is one of the fundamental pillars of modern coding , or else we would have chaos with stupid generic completely unrelated names like Python, C, Java, Go, Swift, Ruby, Assembly, Basic, JavaScript ... It would have been chaos. Obviously none would like that, would they ?
- ergothus 8y ago
  To be fair, most of those pre-date an era where the name collision would be a known significant problem. I remember when Starcraft was released and being frustrated that the young web at the time only gave me info on camping trailers, but even that is much later than half your examples. Also, many of those you name collide with words that have no particular collision within the industry, so while you and I might think "Swift" is a non-ideal choice, it's not the same as the problem people are speaking of here. JavaScript gets a pass because it was intentional. Not wise, as recruiting emails point out to me painfully regularly, but nonetheless intentional. Go is the major and blink-tag-in-neon exception. I have no idea how naming something that is not only one of the english words with the most definitions but ALSO a game that has a higher-than-average overlap with people in the industry AND one that has been a significant target of the industry survived. I can only assume that someone underestimated the concern or I'm overestimating the actual pain. Nowadays, however, there's no reason to repeat the Firebird debacle and fail to do a simple web search within your industry. Particularly if you're with a large company. Doing so earlier in your process is better, but even a last-minute name change can avoid generating a lot of ill will and confusion.
  - jwilk 8y ago
    There was also another language called Go beforehand: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9
    - baby 8y ago
      Golang is the worst because there is already a very popular game called Go. That's why I always call Golang Golang and not Go.
evv 8y ago
Congrats, Emil and team! I'm most excited for this as an extensible platform for further desktop tools, built on FB's robust stack of front-end tech. Although I must admit, I'm disappointed that they didn't use react-native-web to build this app in a cross-platform way. I agree Electron is a good choice for the current landscape, but I'm hopeful that we will be able to move past it. If Sonar was implemented with React Native's layout API, it would be easily portable to projects like react-native-macos, React Native on Windows, or projects like Proton Native, once it matures and stabilizes. Of course Emil knows this, because he is one of the primary maintainers of Yoga, the cross-platform flexbox implementation in React Native. This is one of the primary technologies that will allow us to move away from Electron one day, if people would just stop using CSS!
- sonaltr 8y ago
  what about linux users? Like I get that people don't like Electron because of it's resource heavy nature but it's been a boon to us Linux users who have finally been getting a lot of cross platform apps and I truly appreciate that. getting a Mac is generally not an option - it's too expensive just for a few GUI apps (and overall pushes the bar of development quiet a bit higher) and in all honesty, it's not great for the developer ecosystem to stick to one platform either (new Macbook with the touch-bar is a good reminder of that). I am currently fortunate enough to own and work on OS X, but I do remember when I was in university with a Lenovo T420 running Ubuntu 12.04 having issues with quite a lot of tools when I was just getting started.
  - evv 8y ago
    Agreed that Electron has been a great boon to Linux users. There is no need to loose that. If the app was built with RNs layout API, you could continue supporting Electron via React Native Web. But there are awesome upcoming projects like Proton Native that support Linux UI properly on top of libUI. There was a react-native-ubuntu experiment that unfortunately died down because it forked RN, rather than the Windows approach of using real RN releases.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Gtk+, Qt, wxWidgets, JUCE, Eto, .... There are quite a few options without packing a browser engine with the application. If that is the only way to get applications on Linux, then we should just all move to ChromeOS and dump the Linux desktop attempts as is.
practice9 8y ago
Rename it.
danieldisu 8y ago
I will have to try it, I've been a user of Stetho for a long time and the new network inspection tools from Android studio doesn't completely click for me.
SiempreViernes 8y ago
Oh, it's for debugging mobile apps! I'm not actually interesting in debugging mobile apps, so it would have been nice if that was mentioned at the start. Now I had to wait for the third section, not very helpfully titled "An open source architecture", to find any clues.
- objclxt 8y ago
  It's right there in the first paragraph: > With Sonar, engineers have a highly flexible, intuitive way to inspect and understand the structure and behavior of their iOS and Android application ...and the top of the post is tagged as "Mobile", "iOS", and "Android".
  - donpark 8y ago
    I think he meant appending "for mobile apps" in the title instead of burying key constraint in midst of wordy paragraphs. There is quite a distance between clarity and fine prints.
    - traek 8y ago
      Sure, but it's not accurate to say > I had to wait for the third section, not very helpfully titled "An open source architecture", to find any clues.
marianocordoba 8y ago
This tool looks promising, but it doesn't provides some functionalities that Stetho has, like SQLite and Shared Preferences inspection. Also it is only officially released for MacOS, which is a big con imho.

202 points by emilsjolander 8y ago

I rarely comment on name ambiguity because there is rarely overlap, but this does overlap a bit with the Sonar CI analysis tool IMO. Reading this post, I can create a Sonar plugin with Java? OK, let me Google "Sonar Java plugin"...

tromobne8vb 8y ago
This is even more unfortunately named than the Spark Web UI project.
hliyan 8y ago
FB developers couldn't possibly not know that they would be polluting the test tool namespace with this one...
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  Let's release a face recognition and database application called Facebook.
oceanghost 8y ago
There's also an app called Sonarr.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  A usenet based app :)
- boomskats 8y ago
  Don't forget Cakewalk
neves 8y ago
Hey People from SonarSource: https://www.sonarsource.com/company/history/ https://www.sonarsource.com/company/history/ please file a lawsuit against Facebook. It looks like it is necessary to prevent them to use these confusing names.
- robodale 8y ago
  Not a lawyer, but this looks like an obvious Trademark name dilution scenario. Facebook, change that Sonar name.
mkempe 8y ago
This is so confusing. My immediate reactions were a) but Sonar is already open-source! b) did Facebook somehow acquire Sonar? c) oh, they're actually polluting the name space.
aylmao 8y ago
Didn't they rename to SonarQube though? All of SonarSource's products are named Sonar.*, which is unfortunate but in theory there should be no collisions on a Google search.

khanan 8y ago

Worst... name... ever... Hello SonarQube.

romwell 8y ago
Hello Cakewalk Sonar (a popular DAW)[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk_Sonar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk_Sonar
cocacola1 8y ago
Or Sonarr.

kbd 8y ago

The attached video only supports mono audio in the left channel. Evidently no one involved in this release process listened to the video with headphones. Stuff like this is always humbling to me, that you can have a big release with dozens of people involved yet mess up something simple.

vjeux 8y ago
Sorry about that, it has now been fixed

sonar_un 8y ago

I agree. There are way too many projects with the name sonar in them. There needs to be a rebrand.

artosispylon 8y ago

I use this tool every day at FB and it's awesome. I highly encourage you to try it and see if it fits into your workflow!

tomstockmail 8y ago
Glad to hear the tool works well for FB employee's. As always the contribution to the community is much appreciated. But as others have pointed out, the tool name could use a rebranding. The popular SonarCube is just one example where confusion can arise.
- avarun 8y ago
  Facebook has been using it internally for a long time. It would make no sense for them to rename the tool for open-source release just because a naming conflict exists, unless you'd prefer they just not release it at all?
  - koko775 8y ago
    It can and has been done multiple times in the past - AsyncDisplayKit -> Texture is the one that immediately comes to mind as it happened after open-sourcing.
  - asdsa5325 8y ago
    Actually, it makes perfect sense to rename it.
  - qznc 8y ago
    Why not? Google renames every internal tool they release as well. E.g. Blaze -> Bazel and Rietveld -> Gerrit.
    - cjhopman 8y ago
      > Rietveld -> Gerrit That's a bad example. Gerrit is not a new name for Reitveld, it's a totally new implementation (with similar inspiration). And both of those were publicly released under those names. Your underlying point is quite true, though.

kilon 8y ago

I agree unique naming is one of the fundamental pillars of modern coding , or else we would have chaos with stupid generic completely unrelated names like Python, C, Java, Go, Swift, Ruby, Assembly, Basic, JavaScript ... It would have been chaos. Obviously none would like that, would they ?

ergothus 8y ago
To be fair, most of those pre-date an era where the name collision would be a known significant problem. I remember when Starcraft was released and being frustrated that the young web at the time only gave me info on camping trailers, but even that is much later than half your examples. Also, many of those you name collide with words that have no particular collision within the industry, so while you and I might think "Swift" is a non-ideal choice, it's not the same as the problem people are speaking of here. JavaScript gets a pass because it was intentional. Not wise, as recruiting emails point out to me painfully regularly, but nonetheless intentional. Go is the major and blink-tag-in-neon exception. I have no idea how naming something that is not only one of the english words with the most definitions but ALSO a game that has a higher-than-average overlap with people in the industry AND one that has been a significant target of the industry survived. I can only assume that someone underestimated the concern or I'm overestimating the actual pain. Nowadays, however, there's no reason to repeat the Firebird debacle and fail to do a simple web search within your industry. Particularly if you're with a large company. Doing so earlier in your process is better, but even a last-minute name change can avoid generating a lot of ill will and confusion.
- jwilk 8y ago
  There was also another language called Go beforehand: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9
  - baby 8y ago
    Golang is the worst because there is already a very popular game called Go. That's why I always call Golang Golang and not Go.

evv 8y ago

Congrats, Emil and team! I'm most excited for this as an extensible platform for further desktop tools, built on FB's robust stack of front-end tech. Although I must admit, I'm disappointed that they didn't use react-native-web to build this app in a cross-platform way. I agree Electron is a good choice for the current landscape, but I'm hopeful that we will be able to move past it. If Sonar was implemented with React Native's layout API, it would be easily portable to projects like react-native-macos, React Native on Windows, or projects like Proton Native, once it matures and stabilizes. Of course Emil knows this, because he is one of the primary maintainers of Yoga, the cross-platform flexbox implementation in React Native. This is one of the primary technologies that will allow us to move away from Electron one day, if people would just stop using CSS!

sonaltr 8y ago
what about linux users? Like I get that people don't like Electron because of it's resource heavy nature but it's been a boon to us Linux users who have finally been getting a lot of cross platform apps and I truly appreciate that. getting a Mac is generally not an option - it's too expensive just for a few GUI apps (and overall pushes the bar of development quiet a bit higher) and in all honesty, it's not great for the developer ecosystem to stick to one platform either (new Macbook with the touch-bar is a good reminder of that). I am currently fortunate enough to own and work on OS X, but I do remember when I was in university with a Lenovo T420 running Ubuntu 12.04 having issues with quite a lot of tools when I was just getting started.
- evv 8y ago
  Agreed that Electron has been a great boon to Linux users. There is no need to loose that. If the app was built with RNs layout API, you could continue supporting Electron via React Native Web. But there are awesome upcoming projects like Proton Native that support Linux UI properly on top of libUI. There was a react-native-ubuntu experiment that unfortunately died down because it forked RN, rather than the Windows approach of using real RN releases.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Gtk+, Qt, wxWidgets, JUCE, Eto, .... There are quite a few options without packing a browser engine with the application. If that is the only way to get applications on Linux, then we should just all move to ChromeOS and dump the Linux desktop attempts as is.

practice9 8y ago

Rename it.

danieldisu 8y ago

I will have to try it, I've been a user of Stetho for a long time and the new network inspection tools from Android studio doesn't completely click for me.

SiempreViernes 8y ago

Oh, it's for debugging mobile apps! I'm not actually interesting in debugging mobile apps, so it would have been nice if that was mentioned at the start. Now I had to wait for the third section, not very helpfully titled "An open source architecture", to find any clues.

objclxt 8y ago
It's right there in the first paragraph: > With Sonar, engineers have a highly flexible, intuitive way to inspect and understand the structure and behavior of their iOS and Android application ...and the top of the post is tagged as "Mobile", "iOS", and "Android".
- donpark 8y ago
  I think he meant appending "for mobile apps" in the title instead of burying key constraint in midst of wordy paragraphs. There is quite a distance between clarity and fine prints.
  - traek 8y ago
    Sure, but it's not accurate to say > I had to wait for the third section, not very helpfully titled "An open source architecture", to find any clues.

marianocordoba 8y ago

This tool looks promising, but it doesn't provides some functionalities that Stetho has, like SQLite and Shared Preferences inspection. Also it is only officially released for MacOS, which is a big con imho.