I was thinking of purchasing the 1000$ Zend Guardian. How effective is this to protecting my source code? I want to sell a development but only if no one will be able to get the source code. Any ideas?
I would suggest making use of the beta offer and/or the Zend Guard + Zend Studio Pro offer rather than paying full price. For $500 to $1000 you would expect it to work but whether it does or not I don't know. I would suspect that the encryption could be reverse engineered but the output would likely be quite ugly. It would also likely be quite a lot of work. In most instances it would likely be cheaper just for people to pay you for a licence.
Yeah, I just spoke withsome people from their on live sales. Nice and very helpfu. They explained that it may not be 100% to ensure full encoded, but the decoded sourcecode will be useless to them anyway since its obfuscted entirely and very unmanegable.
Programmers and experienced PHP coders and server administrators will be able to view the source code no problem. Regular webmasters, etc, will not even try.
i can dezend it in 1-2 days.Ioncube is better.Tho it can be decrypted 2 You should ask this to nuller groups.
A few of the sites offering decryption services for zend have disappeared recently. whether its because of legal action, I dunnno. No encryption method for php is 100% secure at the moment IMO. As said above experienced hackers will crack it, but make it awkard enough to decode a script and most will give up trying. hell if they can crack games, applications etc produced by big big budget houses (read Microsoft, sony etc) they can crack php encryption. i used encrypt my scripts but stopped as there was nothing unique about them and I found my servers slowing down because of extra work decrypting them.
Unecrypters are why I always suggest obfuscating first, too. Every level of annoyance is a good thing. If the encrypter does decent obfuscation then you should use that, otherwise use a standalone obfuscator on the code before encrypting.