Hello,

I was using Zend Encoder for almost two years. Couple of weeks ago I found that you had the same product called NuCoder but with much less price + with much more features. The fist idea was: lets try it! If it works what is the reasons of overpaying?

I have couple of question regarding NuCoder:

1) How wide spread is NuCoder? Or in the other words, some of my projects are designed to work on very small shared hosting plans. That means users will not be able to install it (NuCoder) on the server and of cause because of cheap shared hosting plans they cannot ask support to install it. With Zend I have never had such problem because it is install by default on almost 99% servers...

Now let's say couple of words regarding license files and their loading. Manual loading is the best option for me and probably for any software developer. Since the user will not need to do anything... he/she needs to download script archive, unpack on their server and use it As simple as that!

Of cause you have lots of options for loading but changes in php.ini file means high permissions which most of the users will never have, the same could be said about 'php_value' and '.htdocs'. The only two available options left are: 'pelm_load_license' and '--licfile'. So my second question is regarding them.

2) I read in the documentation that file with that function (pelm_load_license) should not be license protected... that means I cannot put anything valuable inside since anyone can execute it without limitations. BUT what if I will put the license checking at the beginning of that script and it will be license protected?

<?php include_once 'CheckLicense.php';

all license loadings and checking will be inside that CheckLicense.php? (I am doing in that way with ZendEncoder).

I like the idea that license could loaded automatically but it written in documentation that I could use relative path in --licfile option. Lets say that file /home/www/scripts/file.php is licensed and the license file is location in /home/www/scripts/license.zl so I will encode that file with --licfile "./license.zl". BUT here is the question,

3) If I will include that licensed file from file new.php which is located in /home/www/new.php how it will work? Will I get the error? Or the how your script could auto load the license file for scripts which are located in sub directories? Or may be you are changing the --licfile value for the php files which are located in sub directories?

nu-coder.exe -r --licfile "./license.zl" c:\project\ c:\project-encoded\

I hope you get the idea what I am asking for

Waiting for your replay

Vitali

You may start using NuCoder without dropping the other ways and you'll quickly see what way bring you less problems with performance and stability.
Finally, if _SOFTWARE_DEVELOPERS_ (like you) don't provide their php applications encoded with NuCoder, why would ISP bother installing corresponding loader?



There is a trivial reason for this. Suppose the file that loads the lincese is lincese-protected itself. The purpose of "loading the license" is in loading the license that is not loaded at the moment right? But if it is not loaded, how would the file work? It can't work without the license loaded.



Not exactly. You still can encode the file and perform necessary checks right after the license is loaded.



It's up to you. Looks like it will be another file, not the file that loads the license. Right?
If you need to do extra-checks, I'd recommend you to do them in 5-6 places widely spreaded through the application. The first place could be for example login script, another file downloading or something like that and so forth.



A self-explanatory script name I wouldn't use it



It would be better to place the license into the topmost directory (/home/www/ in your case). In this case all nested files will calculate path to the license according to their nesting level (they get this info encoded).