Galvanize was conceived by RetroFit9 staff a few years ago to be able to insert data into Google Analytics without using on-page Javascript. Built using PHP, it replicated the server calls that are normally carried out by Google Analytics, but on the server-side, allowing tracking of non-page content such as images, file downloads and even API calls.

Galvanize inspired the php-ga project by the guys over at United Prototype, a similar system using a more consistent object-oriented approach. We like the php-ga project and rather than develop independently, we’ll be contributing to this project in the future.

We’ll continue to develop Galvanize as a wrapper to the php-ga project, the idea being that php-ga will provide a flexible core and Galvanize will provide an easier interface that mimics how the Javascript version of Google Analytics works.

We’ll be posting some updates very soon so stay tuned.