Protecting Code

chowdary

Hi ,
I need your valuable views on this.I hope you will spend a few minuits of your precious time to guide me.
Here is the scenario.
We developed an application and hosted on a virtual server.We offer services to the clients who wants to use this application( basically it's content management application) for some clients we host their pages and for some we may need to install the application on their server in that case they (or some who has access) can simply copy the entire code.I want to protect my code(i.e being copied and modified for their own projetcs) how do i do this.
Any one gives me an idea how to do will be appreciated.

Cheers
Ajay

rdhatt

This'll do exactly what you asked. It's slightly pricey for many PHP developers though.

http://www.zend.com/store/products/zend-encoder.php

Anon

I heard some open-source encoders are in the pipeline

Anon

If the Zend encoder is not an option, would include files to the source help?

I am just guessing, but it may be possible to include(http://your-code-source.com/?query); - or maybe a rewrite rule - that probably makes more sense. (Of course your app would have to be made ready for such calls)

Then eval the query (or url) and send information back accordingly. Your clients don't need the application code itself. If they 'must' have the application code, tell them it'll cost an extra $2400 🙂

-m.

Anon

but surely your talking about a remote include... or read file... which will be slow and double the chance of the site being down (due to two servers)

Anon

True Carl, far from a perfect suggestion, or even a good one.

Little or no other alternatives though. (not counting Zend encoder)

-m.