ZoomStats is a Web Traffic Analyzer much like Web Trends™, Wusage™, Hitbox™, eXTReMe
Tracking™ and many more available over there.
The project was initiated in hope to create high quality Open Source alternative to these expensive beasts.
Currently, ZoomStats is in the planning stage and as such cannot be described in details.
However, for now, plan is this:
Portability
ZoomStats is a software for every usage. It will have to support every database known to the world right now. It is not a very hard thing to do: PHP supports quite a lot of databases today and, thanks to the Object Oriented Design, ZoomStats will be able to work with every and each of them.
For the beginning, till version 1.* we will be only supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle. As these are stable and working, ZoomStats will look to satisfy IIS/MSSQL combo and more complex setups.
Statistics Collection
There are three ways of getting the clients data:
- via simple inclusion of PHP file
- by adding JavaScript code
- by crawling the web-server?s log files.
ZoomStats will support these three ways. It is possible due the fact that statistics will actually be help within a database, and as such the preferred Collecting way can be independent from the application. It could as well support three types at the same time (depending on the platforms).
Initially, ZoomStats will be supporting PHP-INCLUDE and JAVASCRIPT methods. SERVER-LOG will come out eventually.
User interface
The several designers will be working on the interface to create the most usable approach as possible. One thing the other Open Source solutions are missing is exactly this ? usability design. ZoomStats will also support skinning by using templates engine Smarty.
Simplified installation
In plans is also a way to create a module that can automatically warn the user of an available update to his version. This is very helpful due the fact that most users would have up-to-date user-recognition techniques.
Another feature that would be very cool to implement is the possibility of self-debugging for the application like in cases it receives the unknown data ? it would then be able to contact sf.net site and notify us of the unknown data received (something similar to automated error reporting that WinXp does).
Browser recognition
For speed purpose, we will avoid any regular expression and instead will be using a custom browsercap file. That will be the only source for browser types and can be easily imported into any database for the logical reference.
