Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Python Web Frameworks Excessive Complexity

Cyclomatic (or conditional) complexity is a metric used to indicate the complexity of a source code. In this post we will take a look at web frameworks source code and estimate excessive complexity, something that is beyond recommended level of 10 (threshold that points to the fact the source code is too complex and refactoring is suggested). Here is a list of web frameworks examined:
  1. bottle
  2. cherrypy
  3. circuits
  4. django
  5. falcon
  6. flask
  7. pyramid
  8. pysi
  9. tornado
  10. turbogears
  11. web.py
  12. web2py
  13. webapp2
  14. wheezy.web
The source code is hosted on bitbucket, let clone it into some directory and setup virtual environment (this will download source code per framework listed above).
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/akorn/helloworld
cd helloworld/04-pep8 && make env up
The make file has a target for mccabe metric, so issue make mccabe.