New from Harry Fuecks' weblog this morning comes an interesting take on Perl helping PHP through PHPXref.

Via the International PHP Magazine (Feb 2004, Print Edition) : PHPXref - a Perl utility for cross-referencing PHP source code and very handy indeed.

Basically you point it at some directory containing PHP source code and it generates a set of static HTML pages allowing you to browse the code in your project. The most useful feature is the list of classes, functions (+ methods) and variables it builds. If you need to know all the places in your code a particular function get's called from, you can find out immediately. Also nice is PHPXref seems to be aware of phpdoc markup [edit] - aware of "doc blocks" at least.[/edit]

Seems like this is another take on the phpDocumentor style of functionality, creating static pages allowing you to view the contents and functionality of your source. From what I can tell, though, PHPXref doesn't require any special tags or formatting to allow it to work correctly out of the box. Hmm, definitely worth a look...