Hello everybody; we're traying to finich our first commercial app php, and we are looking how to protect them when u install this app php and xampp in other machine ( machine of costumer ). I would like to protect our application, in the case where u install at costumer Chees.
you can't anything and everything that is at customer servers, can be cracked only protection that works reliably i know of, is the one, that is sold as a service, i.e google - SAAS
You can use IonCube or http://www.phpencode.org/ or http://www.zend.com/en/products/guard/ there are more of these encoding services, you can google it.
You can't protect PHP, you can just make it difficult to copy. Also there are many people who will refuse to use protected code.
I use PHPLockIt and own licensing method, it's cheapest solution, and will keep away most of my customers away from using my script on different domain.
Oh yes you can compile your own PHP code and providing just binaries. How to compile? Google is your friend but you may give a try to bcompiler.
Personally I wouldn't purchase a commercial script that obfuscated the code. Developers who purchase scripts DO feel the need to customize them to make them work within their web site.
Ditto on that. Especially since PHP obfuscation crap usually impacts performance and is far too easy to slap aside if need be... and if one actually worked, it leaves you at the mercy of the original developer which can often be a bad thing; particularly if after choosing that software the originator goes belly up. Generally that type of BS on a PHP application is more a warning sign of it being a giant scam, or that the developer simply chose the wrong language from the very start of their project.