In part 1 of this series we discussed the size and complexity metrics calculated by phploc. We continue with a discussion about dependencies and structure.

Structure

This section gives us an idea of how many things there are of a certain type. These can be useful indicators too. For example, if the number of Namespaces is low, there may be a lack of grouping, which is bad for discoverability. It’ll be hard to find out where a certain piece of logic can be found in the code. Too many namespaces, relative to the number of Classes/Interfaces/Traits, is not a good sign either. I would expect every namespace to have a couple of classes that naturally belong together.

When I want to get a very rough idea of the quality of both code and structure of a PHP code base, I like to run phploc on it. This is a tool created by Sebastian Bergmann for (I assume) exactly this purpose. It produces the following kind of output:

Directories                                          3
Files                                               10

Size
  Lines of Code (LOC)                             1882
  Comment Lines of Code (CLOC)                     255 (13.55%)
  Non-Comment Lines of Code (NCLOC)               1627 (86.45%)
  Logical Lines of Code (LLOC)                     377 (20.03%)
    Classes                                        351 (93.10%)
      Average Class Length                          35
        Minimum Class Length                         0
        Maximum Class Length                       172
      Average Method Length                          2
        Minimum Method Length                        1
        Maximum Method Length                      117
    Functions                                        0 (0.00%)
      Average Function Length                        0
    Not in classes or functions                     26 (6.90%)

Cyclomatic Complexity
  Average Complexity per LLOC                     0.49
  Average Complexity per Class                   19.60
    Minimum Class Complexity                      1.00
    Maximum Class Complexity                    139.00
  Average Complexity per Method                   2.43
    Minimum Method Complexity                     1.00
    Maximum Method Complexity                    96.00

Dependencies
  Global Accesses                                    0
    Global Constants                                 0 (0.00%)
    Global Variables                                 0 (0.00%)
    Super-Global Variables                           0 (0.00%)
  Attribute Accesses                                85
    Non-Static                                      85 (100.00%)
    Static                                           0 (0.00%)
  Method Calls                                     280
    Non-Static                                     276 (98.57%)
    Static                                           4 (1.43%)

Structure
  Namespaces                                         3
  Interfaces                                         1
  Traits                                             0
  Classes                                            9
    Abstract Classes                                 0 (0.00%)
    Concrete Classes                                 9 (100.00%)
  Methods                                          130
    Scope
      Non-Static Methods                           130 (100.00%)
      Static Methods                                 0 (0.00%)
    Visibility
      Public Methods                               103 (79.23%)
      Non-Public Methods                            27 (20.77%)
  Functions                                          0
    Named Functions                                  0 (0.00%)
    Anonymous Functions                              0 (0.00%)
  Constants                                          0
    Global Constants                                 0 (0.00%)
    Class Constants                                  0 (0.00%)

These numbers are statistics, and as you know, they can be used to tell the biggest lies. Without the context of the actual code, you can interpret them in any way you like. So you need to be careful making conclusions based on them. However, in my experience these numbers are often quite good indicators of the overall code quality as well as the structural quality of a project.