You will still have to run cron to schedule the php call because php depends on a request to be interpreted.
You can write a class in PHP and use the methods class_exists to check if the class x exists, if it exists you create an instance of it and use the method, method_exists to verify that the and method exists. If it exists, you execute the method.
You can use php as a script to call it in terminal via cli, you just have to say that the text interpreter to be used is php, adding a statement similar to the statement after the start of the file, because it should have the path of your php interpreter, if you do not know where to find it, you can type it on the whereis php console, which will be displayed).
#!/usr/local/bin/php
I'm assuming you're using linux.