Details
Improvement
Closed
Major
Description
When using jenkins in combination with php_depend (and I'm assuming also when running Sonar standalone), the results from php_depend are stored in some xml file. This xml file holds numbers for metrics that are not yet incorporated in Sonar.
I don't know if this is new functionality from php_depend 1.0x, but it would be nice if the calculated metrics would be checked to see if they were already incorporated in Sonar (and be made accessible via the Sonar Web Service API).
For a certain PHP project I can see that some metrics like DIT (Depth of Inheritance Tree), maxDIT, fanout, etc are calculated, but they are not accessible through the Sonar Web Service API. For instance, Fanout is just another name for efferent coupling.
If these new metrics would be incorporated the overview of php projects would be greatly improved.
Activity
Hi Fabrice,
Thank you for your comment. I don't see any other metrics from PDepend that you missed, but I would like to point out that other developers might create good plugins from data that is (at a certain point only) accessible via the Web Service API. I'm sure you'll know the open data initiative, and I think the project would benefit from making more data accessible as long as it does not end up in a wild jungle of unrelated information of course.
The reason why I asked it in the first place was because I was working on a small application that could warn developers when a certain metric (and I have selected only a few basic (coupling, cohesion, complexity and size) metrics) would get a value that lies outside the standard deviation of past measurements. As far as I know there is no such plugin / mechanism yet. I could also give developers access to the actual Sonar website, but I think developers get lost in too much information and drill-down possibilities and so they will lose their focus from the important message.
But anyway, I understand and respect your decision nonetheless 
This confirms my initial feeling. We want to have a consistent experience accross all languages in Sonar, so that's why we try to have the same set of metrics. And be sure that we try to select the metrics that are the most meaningful 
Thanks anyway for your feedback!
I've quickly browsed the metrics page for PDepend (at http://pdepend.org/documentation/software-metrics/index.html) and I actually don't find extra metrics that would be useful to add in Sonar - for the following reason:
I understand that it could be tempting to store all the metrics to get them all using the Web service API, but actually the purpose of Sonar is first to offer valuable functional features (and not a simple "datastore").
Remy, in regards of those explanations, do see PDepend metrics that I could have missed that would still have a value to be pushed by the PHP plugin?