Product Highlight: Nu-Coder by NuSphere
ShareThisWith PHP becoming a bigger player in the realm of enterprise web application design, there are several questions that the PHP developer must ask his/herself. One such question is licensing, and whether or not an application should be open or closed source.
Since PHP itself is an open source project, the vast majority of products released using PHP are open source as well. However, there may be a need to license out software-as-a-service, or the need to secure your source. Enter Nu-Coder.
According to the NuSphere page, Nu-Coder “converts the source code of PHP Scripts into compiled PHP bytecodes for both accelerated runtime performance and maximum security.” This is important when developing applications for limited commercial distribution, especially over the web. Nu-Coder compiles and optionally obfuscates your code (prior to compilation) to prevent source viewing.
Note: This should never be a replacement for good security practices, such as validation, casting, using prepared statments, and the like. Instead it augments an existing security structure and prevents code tampering.
Nu-Coder can optionally use a license manager to generate and distribute licenses with your applications. This includes a TTL on the license, in case you distribute trial software.
Nu-Coder has been used for the distribution of the Agency Builder application. I use it in conjunction with the NuSphere IDE, PhpEd, which has a visual interface to integrate Nu-Coder into your projects. Without PhpEd, you are left with a command-line interface to Nu-Coder. While the manual is very thorough in explaining the command-line interface, it is always nice to have easy visual integration!
Nu-Coder uses NuSphere’s accelerator, PhpExpress, to load the pre-compiled files at runtime. Versions are available for Windows, Linux, BSD, and more. Note: All versions are under the “Windows” download, included as tarballs.
I’ve highlighted Nu-Coder today because I believe the adoption of source protection for PHP is key to its acceptance in the broader enterprise. It prevents code tampering, speeds up applications (by skipping a step of the runtime PHP cli/cgi), and secures distribution channels through licensing. I highly recommend it.