Convert a symfony application to an unreadable archive

Question

A month ago a client asked me to develop an application, he didn't mention weather it’s a desktop or a web application.

So I chose to develop a web application using the symfony framework

Now the application is working fine, the client is satisfied, but a problem comes up

actually the client want to sell that application to his customers, so he want me to hide the source code, in other words he want me to deliver an archive or something so that his clients won't read the code. I don't know how to hide PHP code, now if I can't find any solution I have to start from scratch and develop the application using java :/

After googling

1. Hiphop: a PHP compiler, its main purpose is to speed up the code. The fact that it becomes unreadable as a compiled executable is a bonus.

2. PHAR archive: like JAR in java but I think it's easy to read the content of the archive

Any suggestions ?

Answer 1

Pack the application into an virtual appliance using VirtualBox, and disable the login on that virtual machine.

Apart from being the best possible solution to your 'problem' it also makes things easy for end user and your client. It is not perfect solution, but it is as good as you can get.

Answer 2

What you seem to be looking for is a PHP encoder. A number of these are available commercially; two of the more commonly used ones are Zend Guard and IonCube.

Note that both will require a special PHP extension to be installed on the target machine, and may place some special requirements on your application. (In particular, Zend Guard currently only supports PHP 5.4.)