The DevX site has posted a new tutorial talking about their method for creating reports and generating statistics based off of data from your PHP application.

Statistics and reports analyze the change over time of any kind of phenomena. [...] For the software industry, statistics and reports provide both an ongoing challenge and an ongoing market. At present, programming languages such as PHP and Java come with built-in packages for developing applications around statistical problems.

They use two PEAR packages for the statistics - Text_Statistics and XML_Statistics to pull in different kinds of data and extract results from it. The next step is to make a meaningful report out of these numbers - that's where PHPReports comes in. It's a simple tool that makes simple reports for you that can then be styled with CSS however you'd like.