Zend Encoder Review - Market Needs (
Page 3 of 5 )
One of the major problems I feared when using
the encoder is that it would cause a slowdown in my PHP scripts. When working
on high-traffic sites, every second counts and the benefit of encoding my applications
would be outweighed if the performance suffered.
Surprisingly enough, some of my programs ran faster with the Zend Encoder then
without it. Most of the other applications ran at close to the same speed (some
a little faster, some a little slower). And if you couple in the Zend Cache, the
performance stops being an issue (as the Zend cache saves a memory imprint of
your application, and no decoding is necessary).
My second fear is the strength of the encryption used. After all, what's the
use of using the Zend encoder if it doesn't properly encode your scripts (ie,
it just messes up the whitespace a bit, or moves words around).
I've found the Zend Encoder's encryption to be quite satisfactory. While I really
can't verify more than the fact, that I couldn't decrypt it. I don't think most
customers will bother figuring out how to decrypt your encoded code, the fact
that its encoded is enough.
Unfortunately, one problem that does occur with the encryption is that Zend's
OP structures are not modified. Therefore if someone decided to write a program
that translates an OP structure into working running PHP code. The encryption
loses a lot of its value (of course the dumped output may be completely different
than the original script, and will be devoid of comments). However, I don't see
that happening any time soon, because its simply too much effort for too little
gain
