In a new post, Matthew Turland looks at one thing that he feels is missing from a lot of the PHP functionality currently available in the community today - log analysis features.

Log analysis is a fairly common task in the field of web development, most often analysis of web server traffic logs or what Wikipedia refers to as web analytics. PHP has no officially supported extensions designed specifically for log analysis. There are no related extensions in PECL. The only remotely related extension in PEAR is PEAR_Log, which for generating logs rather than parsing or analyzing them. In short, there is no common solution here.

He looks at the options that developers do have - make their own solution or go with a third party option. He believes, though, that a PECL extension would be more the way to go, integrating with PHP more closely and allow for easier parsing and manipulating of the data in their own log files.