Are there any PHP code visualization tools?

Question

Looking for software that will analyze php code (i.e. all of wordpress or the thematic theme) and show me pretty pictures (perhaps a block diagram) of all the connections to help me more quickly get an understanding of where things are and what's connected to what.

Ideally, this software would run on a Mac, but I'll take anything: Windows, Linux, web-based, etc.

Answer 1

• KCachegrind - With Xdebug you can profile the execution of your scripts, KCachegrind can generate some pretty awesome call graphs from this
• nwire for Eclipse

Answer 2

[UPDATE: This answer does not handle namespaces, so is basically obsolete. I'll leave it here in case anyone finds the DOT approach interesting.]

Here's a simple way to graph class inheritance in PHP.

Grep for class definitions and then transform the grep output to DOT syntax. NOTE: This process WILL require trial and error in your situation. Run the grep separately, and tweak it to show the right class definition lines before putting it in the script!

This script was for PHP on standard *nix (I used Ubuntu), with graphviz installed, and using grep -v to exclude some directories that were of no interest because I was looking at a CakePHP codebase. Fdp worked better than sfdp, dot, circo or neato in this situation.

Create generateClassHierarchy.sh

#!/bin/bash
echo 'digraph code {' > code.dot;
grep -r "^class " * | grep -v "^app/vendors" | grep -v "^cake/" | grep -v "Binary file" | sed 's/.*://' | sed 's/class /    /' | sed 's/ extends / -> /' | sed 's/ implements .*//'  | sed 's/ \?{.*$//' | sort >> code.dot  
echo '}' >> code.dot; 
fdp -Tpng -ocode.fdp.png code.dot 2> /dev/null # Ignore syntax error
echo "OK"; 

Then just:

cd /var/www/my_app/                     # or wherever
bash ~/shell/generateClassHierarchy.sh  # or wherever
eog code.fdp.png 

Replace eog with your preferred image viewer. I have run this on Zend Framework as a test, and produced a 22 megabyte PNG graph. Running it on just Zend_Db shows you this (example is on my site):

http://chapman.id.au/generate-php-class-inheritance-diagrams-in-graphviz

Answer 3

Maybe http://phpcallgraph.sourceforge.net/ for static analysis.

It can output to various formats.