phpdoc vs. phpxref

Question

Does one have capabilities the other doesn't? is it a problem the neither has been updated in about 3 years? Is there something lacking from both?

Answer 1

I like to think they target two different goals.

I wrote PHPXref over a decade ago as a quick hack to allow me to get to grips perusing the source code of a large project quickly & easily, without needing a lot of tools (just Perl, and not even that if you're on Windows) and without needing a remote web server. The documentation part of it was a useful side effect, but really I just wanted a decent way of reading through hyperlinked source code in a browser.

PHPDocumentor and similar tools do a much better job of generating real documentation from source in a variety of formats.

PHPXref could definitely use some updates (or a rewrite), but should still be useful today - You can download it and have output with no configuration in a couple of minutes, so it's cheap to see if it suits your needs.

Answer 2

The de-facto standard is PHPDocumentor.

A rather old comparison of phpdoc and phpxhref can be found in this short blog post:

• http://kb.ucla.edu/articles/phpxref-vs-phpdocumentor

Since both tools haven't been update that much since then, it should still reflect the facts.

Another popular documentor is doxygen.

The new kid on the block is http://github.com/theseer/phpdox