Next generation of Drupal data collection and analysis tools, featuring extensibility
I recently began sketching out a module that will ultimately allow quick generation of custom reports and graphs based on arbitrary tables (Drupal or other). It's called Reports.
After beginning work on this module, I was contacted by several others who are working on related modules.
There are currently several modules available that augment Drupal's internal reports/statistics, however, none of them, AFAIK, were designed to be extensible.
I believe Drupal would benefit greatly from an extensible set of tools for collecting data and creating reports and graphs related to a specific Drupal website. These tools would be flexible and should be able to utilize arbitrary tables and perhaps new tables whose purpose is solely for reporting purposes (ie "cooked" data such as user sessions).
This group seems like the logical place to centralize these efforts. I will plan on keeping this group informed of progress on Reports. Hopefully developers of other similar or related modules will do the same.
supporting this
I think it's a really good idea to create such a module.
With the Drupal 4.x series I used a lot of statistics related modules (statistics filtering, statistic trends or graphstat). Most of them haven't been converted to Drupal 5.x what I really regret.
Xstatistics was a try to do the same you want to do in a much smaller way. Maybe because of that fact it has never been extended by other programmers.
Well, I support your plans full. Would be nice if you could post up me/us here in this group.
SWF Charts?
Have you looked at SWF Charts as a 5.x option? It would probably require more work to get the data structured properly, but the underlying graphics engine is capable of some very impressive output.