Arnaud Heritier just dug up some old page on the Maven wiki that I had created back in 2005/2006.
I had written the Maven1 Dashboard plugin and when Maven2 came out I thought about rewriting it with a new more performant architecture and with more features.
At the time, I wanted to start working on this full time and I proposed the idea to several companies to see if they would sponsor its development (Atlassian, Cenqua, Octo Technology). They were all interested but for various reasons, I ended up joining the XWiki SAS company to work on the XWiki open source project.
So once I knew I wouldn't be working on this, I shared my idea publicly on the Maven wiki to see if anyone else would be interested to implement it.
Back then, I was happily surprised to see that Freddy Mallet actually implemented the idea:
In September 2006, I've discovered this page written by Vincent which has directly inspired the launch of an Open Source project. One year later we are pleased to announce that Sonar 1.0 release is now available. The missions of Sonar are to :
* Centralize and share quality information for all projects under continuous quality control
* Show you which ones are in pain
* Tell you what are the diseases
To do that, Sonar aggregates metrics from Checkstyle, PMD, Surefire, Cobertura / Clover and JavaNCSS. You can take a look to the screenshots gallery to get a quick insight.
Have fun.
Freddy
To give you the full picture, I'm now publishing something I never made public which are the slides that I wrote when I wanted to develop the idea:
Qdashboard and SonarQube have several differences. An important one is that in the idea of QDashboard, there was supposed to be several input sources such as mailing lists, issue tracker, etc. At the moment SonarQube derives metrics mostly from the SCM. But I'm sure that the SonarQube guys have a lot of ideas in store for the future
In 2013 I got a very nice present from SonarSource: a T-shirt recognizing me as #0 "employee" in the company, as the "Inceptor". That meant a lot to me.
Several years after, SonarQube has come a long way and I'm in awe of the great successful product it has become. Congrats guys!