Free source code metrics software for linux

Source Speak is a PHP program which enables a person to display their programs source code. If you are wondering why someone would want to share their code, there are many reasons.

displaying code for a potential employer
showing other developers your algorithms
developers on add to your code

This program is easy to use. Just copy the program to your web server that has PHP installed. The next step is to copy your project into the projects directory.

Perl::Metric::Basic is a Perl module that can provide basic software metrics.

SYNOPSIS

# first construct a PPI::Document object to pass in
my $document = PPI::Document->load("t/lib/Acme.pm");

# then retrieve metrics on the document
my $m = Perl::Metric::Basic->new;
my $metric = $m->measure($document);

# $metric will consist of something like:
# Acme => {
# new => {
# blank_lines => 1,
# comments => 1,
# lines => 7,
# lines_of_code => 6,
# numbers => 0,
# numbers_unique => 0,
# operators => 3,
# operators_unique => 2,
# symbols => 5,
# symbols_unique => 2,
# words => 7,
# words_unique => 6
# },
# ...

When constructing software one often produces code of vastly differing quality. The Perl::Metric::Basic module leverages the PPI module to provide some interesting software metrics for Perl code, mostly measuring size and maintainability.

A metric is some sort of measurement which is intended to help you make a decision about a piece of code. There arent any hard rules about metrics, but the ones provided should allow you to make decisions about modules or subroutines which are outliers. Abnormal measurements in a subroutine are a warning sign that you should reexamine that routine, checking for unusually low quality.

This module uses the PPI module, and thus can parse Perl code without evaluating it.
If youre interested in software metrics, I highly recommend "Code Complete" (Second Edition) by Steve McConnel (Microsoft Press).

METHODS

new()

The new() method is the constructor:
my $m = Perl::Metric::Basic->new;

measure()

The measure() method measures some metrics and returns a hash reference. Files in Perl can contain more than one package, and it is interesting to seperate metrics by package. The key for the hash reference is the name of the package, and the value is another hash reference.

Perl packages are seperated into subroutines, and it is interesting to seperate metrics by subroutine. The key for the second hash reference is the name of the subroutine, and the value is another hash reference containing metrics.

There are various metrics applied to the subroutine. The key for the third hash reference is the name of the metric, and the value is the value of the metric. The metrics are:

blank_lines

The number of blank code lines.

comments

The number of lines containing comments.

lines

The total number of lines.

lines_of_code

The number of lines of code.

numbers

The total number of numbers used (eg "$z = 42 * 3" would have 2 numbers).

numbers_unique

The number of unique numbers used (eg "$z = 2*$x + 2*$y" would have 1 unique number).

operators

The total number of operators used.

operators_unique

The number of unique operators used.

symbols

The total number of symbols used (eg "$z = $x*$x + $y*$y" would have 5 symbols).

symbols_unique

The number of unique symbols used (eg "$z = $x*$x + $y*$y" would have 3 unique symbols).

words

The total number of words (operators) used.

words_unique

The number of unique words used.

Panopticode project provides a standardized format for describing the structure of software projects and integrates metrics from several tools into that format.
Reporting options provide correlation, historic analysis, and visualization.
Main features:
The Good
- There is a rich selection of tools available to the Java community for gathering code metrics. These tools can be invaluable for tasks such as:
- Prioritizing refactoring and redesign work
- Understanding unfamiliar or large code bases
- Ensuring coding standards are being followed
- Evaluating software quality
- Informing extend -vs- rewrite decisions
- Proving that contractual obligations have been met
- Comparing competing tools
The Bad and The Ugly
- While these tools are powerful they suffer from a number of problems such as:
- Installation and configuration can be difficult and time consuming
- Most only measure the status at a point in time and have no concept of historical data
- Each tool represents its data in a proprietary format
- It is very difficult to correlate data from different tools
- It can be difficult to switch between competing tools that provide similar functions
- Most have extremely limited reporting and visualization capabilities
Enhancements:
- This release provides treemaps of code coverage, treemaps of complexity, integrates metrics from Emma, JavaNCSS, and JDepend, and gathers metrics from CheckStyle, Cobertura, Complexian, Simian, and Subversion.
- Treemaps are a powerful visualization for seeing both the overall picture and a great deal of detail at the same time.

CodePrinter is a tiny utility to print out source code or other text files. CodePrinter projects main intent is to provide you with print-outs for your code reviews and to save some paper by fitting two code pages onto one sheet of paper.
CodePrinter is written in Java and makes use of the Java Printing API. Its an Open Source project hosted at SourceForge.net and is protected by the GNU General Public License.
Unix- & Linux people should consider a2ps as an alternative.
Main features:
- Printing of one or multiple files
- Line numbering
- Simple syntax highlighting for .java, .html and .xml files
- Preview with zoom-in/zoom-out functionality
- Printing of a single or all previewed pages
- Font and font size selection

CodeWorker is a versatile Open Source, licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License, parsing tool and a source code generator devoted to generative programming.
Generative programming is a software engineering approach interested in automating the production of reusable, tailor-made, adaptable and reliable IT systems.
In laymans terms, CodeWorker lets you generate code by parsing existing languages, or by creating and parsing your own language. Once a language file has been parsed, CodeWorker provides several techniques for generating code.
The tools scripting language drives the parsing and source code generation process. The scripting language syntax is derived from the C family of languages, making it familiar to most programmers.
The template syntax is like like JSP, ASP, or Velocity. It has variations for parsing, code generation, or functional programming, giving the developer a number of options for organizing CodeWorker projects.
Parsing
CodeWorker can be trained to parse almost any language and provides two distinct methods for creating parsers:
- the extended-BNF notation is declarative, and is a derivative of BNF (the Backus-Naur Form defines the grammar of a language) extended with regular expressions, predefined non-terminals and useful directives. Something close to javacc or to ANTLR in the JAVA world except a separate parser class is not necessary with CodeWorker. This means that parsing scripts can be tested without having to compile a separate parser class.
- Reading tokens is procedural and a somewhat obsolete now that CodeWorker handles BNF parsing scripts smoothly.
While parsing files, CodeWorker feeds nodes into a parse tree. A tree is a convenient structure to represent a hierarchical set of nodes, as in XML for instance.
The parse tree is populated by the parsing task, and used by the source code generation script to generate code, text or binary data.
Source Code Generation
CodeWorker can parse a language and use the resulting parse tree to generate source code via template-based scripts. One example is database DDL (Database Definition Language). CodeWorker has been used to parse DDL and generate large portions of a Java application.
CodeWorkers source code generation can occur in three ways: generation, expansion or translation.
- generation uses a script, much like JSP or PHP, to produce an output file. Only certain areas, called protected areas in the vocabulary of CodeWorker, are preserved in the file.
- expansion is used when small portions of an existing file need to be generated. The points where code is to be inserted are called markers in the vocabulary of CodeWorker, and code is inserted at the markers. The Class Wizard of Visual C++ generates code using this principle.
- translation mode is used when both parsing and source code generation are required to produce a file. Here are the description of two main families of use:
- source-to-source translation: a file must be rewritten in a different syntax. For example, a LaTeX file might have to be translated in HTML.
- program transformation: a source file has to change for optimizing, refactoring, instrumenting or rewriting selected portions. For example, a script could add a trace at the beginning of each function body of a JAVA or C++ source code. To do that, parsing discovers function bodies, and source code generation will insert the code that implements the trace.
Enhancements:
- Concepts of Aspect-Oriented Programming were added to code generation with joint points, advices, and point cuts.
- It allows a better separation of concerns inside a code generation process, leading to improved reading and maintenance of large and complex template-based scripts.
- A new BNF directive was added: #readPythonString.
- Some bugfixes and updates were made in the Eclipse plugin.

JSwat is a graphical, stand-alone Java debugger, using the JPDA library.
JSwat Java Debugger offers breakpoints with monitors and conditions, colorized source code display, single-stepping, displaying variables, viewing stack frames, and expression evaluation.
Main features:
- breakpoints with conditionals and monitors
- colorized source code display
- graphical display panels showing threads
- stack frames
- visible variables
- loaded classes
- command interface for more advanced features
- Java-like expression evaluation, including method invocation.