For an assignment we have to extract some software metrics from the Hibernate project. We have to extract the afferent coupling and efferent coupling metrics (dependency fan-in, fan-out) from each revision of each package in Hibernate. Some tools were provided which are able to extract these metrics, such as ckjm and JDepend. Other tools I have checked were Sonar, javancss and AOP. There is also the Metrics Eclipse plugin which I didn't get to work either.

What these tools have in common, as far as I can see, is that they all operate on bytecode (*.class files). This is a problem, because I have to build every revision from source in order to run, say, JDepend on it. Older revisions won't build because my development stack is too recent. What I would like to do is to do this kind of analysis on source files so that I don't have to build each revision. Is this possible? Or is there a good reason why all these tools only operate on bytecode?