In the development of things, there comes a point when it escapes the vision and control of one man/one mind. PHP frameworks are such ... beasts. But the simplicity a machine took away can be made to return. And such an attempt at zooming out of the complex file structure bureaucracy of most php projects was inclued.
When I hacked up that extension, nearly a year back, I wished that it would shame at least some php programmers into writing better code. And slowly, thanks to a few slides from Rasmus, people are actually slowly realizing how messy their include hierarchy really is. And here's an example of what I'm talking about.
That was the Zend Framework 1.5.2, as blogged by phpimpact - download the big one and look at it. The joomla CMS has also got its very own pretty picture elsewhere. Rasmus has a bunch of inclued traces from various frameworks - CakePHP, Symfony, Drupal, and perhaps the cleanest of them all, CodeIgniter.
Now, all that remains is a php-graphviz + svg mode which renders these in-browser as an iframe - or maybe someone can help me with the graph reduction to take a collection of the inclued dumps & create a "package". There's none an end to the bells and whistles I want to tack onto this.
But as long as people are scrambling head over heels to reduce the number of includes & include_onces, I think I've done my part here.
--Must I hold a candle to my shames?
-- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"