[singapore-pm] Class::Sniff - making object inheritance trees

[Gaurav Vaidya]

Hey there,

I saw something cool on the Perl-QA mailing list today, and thought  
this list might be interested. If you have to document complex object  
hierarchies [1], the new Class::Sniff module might be helpful.

On Feb 16, 2009, at 12:49 AM, Ovid wrote:
> If you're struggling to understand a complex app, a graph of the  
> inheritance hierarchy can be very useful.  Here's an example for  
> TAP::Parser:
>
> http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j275/publius_ovidius/Geek%20Stuff/graph-5.png
>
> It's generated with this code:
>
>    #!/usr/bin/env perl
>
>    use strict;
>    use warnings;
>
>    use Class::Sniff 0.08;
>    use TAP::Parser;
>    my @sniffs = Class::Sniff->new_from_namespace({
>        namespace => 'TAP::Parser',
>        universal => 1,
>    });
>    my $graph    = $sniffs[0]->combine_graphs( @sniffs[ 1 ..  
> $#sniffs ] );
>    my $graphviz = $graph->as_graphviz();
>    open my $DOT, '|dot -Tpng -o graph.png'
>        or die("Cannot open pipe to dot: $!");
>    print $DOT $graphviz;
>
>
> It should be on the CPAN soon.  If you prefer, it's also on github:
>
>  http://github.com/Ovid/class--sniff/tree/master
>
> Cheers,
> Ovid

There's a Git repository on GitHub, too, so customizing this for your  
own use should be pretty easy. Hope this helps!

cheers,
Gaurav

Footnote [1]: Not me -- the best thing about working in a startup is a  
complete absence of legacy code! :-P