It is getting noticed

Within the last two weeks I noticed that PHP-Front and PHP-Sat are being discovered by people that are looking for PHP-specific solutions. It is not that we are flooded with request, but I am still happy with every question :)

The first question was send to the psat-dev-mailinglist and was about the Cyclomatic complexity of PHP code. I replied that it would not get into PHP-Sat because it is not a bug-pattern. However, it would be a nice tool for the PHP-Tools project. I made a similar tool for Java because of an assignment in the past, so it is probably just a matter of renaming the Strategies to use the PHP-Front api. Unfortunately, I didn't get an answer about how the report should look like. If you have any ideas please let me know in the comments, or in the issue.

A second question was about the grammar of PHP-Front, or actually the license of this grammar. The people behind TXL have derived a PHP-grammar for TXL from the SDF-grammar in PHP-Front. Since our license does not state anything about derived work without common source, we were asked for our permission to distribute this new grammar. Naturally, this permission was given very quickly and we were also allowed to take a peak at the source. I must say that I find it interesting, but I currently do not have time to look into it all. I imagine that the definitions of the grammars and TXL itself is similar to how things work in Stratego, but I have to look into that.

The last question in this series is about defined functions. Finding out which functions are defined in a project is easy when classes are ignored, a simple grep on the project will do. When a project also includes classes it becomes trickier to get all functions defined outside of a class. The question was whether PHP-Front could help with this issue, and the answer is of course yes!
Within the reflection part of the library the list of defined functions and classes is already available. This makes it possible to write a tool to show all defined functions in just a few lines of code. Since it was also a nice tool for the PHP-Tools project I added a tool for this last Friday.

Another issue that was brought up by the last e-mail is the issue of our implementation language. Since Stratego is relatively unknown the project has a steep learning curve. On the other hand, if I had chosen a different implementation language it would have taken me way longer to implement the current features. And besides, this piece of code is not that hard to understand right?

  defined-functions-main =
    include-files-complex
  ; get-php-environment
  ; get-functions
  ; if ?[]
    then !"No functions defined."
    else  map(transform-to-message)
        ; lines                    
    end