So guys,

Here I am, very very and very frustrated about Nusphere at this moment.
I am just about to release a new product and I have a lot of requests for Php5.4 support, which is not possible with phpexpress.

Overall I am using Nusphere and Zend products since 10 years, I switched a lot between them, using them in parallel and so on...

But in the php world, things started to change faster and we need to keep up the pace.
2012-03-01 was the release date of Php5.4. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Release_history

Now, I find it very annoying that after 1 year and more we don't have a working encoder for this version.
Following up the topic on the forums it seems that there is no mean to further develop the encoder.

Also, Phped haven't evolved a lot. There is not much difference between Version 6 and 9. And the latest version of Zend Studio is really good.


So, I am seriously thinking on changing the encoder. It seems that Ioncube might be the candidate. Zend Guard is still bloody expensive.


The only thing I like about Phped is the debugger. It's still the best one.

Maybe it should be a signal to Nusphere team to provide some roadmaps, to know what/when we can expect things. Silence is the worst.

Regards,
A not very happy customer.

I recognize the feeling and we are also surprised by the lack of information from NuSphere - I have contacted their support but same store-wall there.
Seems like the future for encoding products is not that bright. In a recent 5.4 project I signed a NDA with the customer and delivered non-encoded source running with Xcache - not an ideal solution but what else to do?!?

I switched to ioncube. This is the end for me with nusphere encoder.

I have to say, I am surprised by ioncube in a very positive way. Documentation is way better, the support is good and possibilities are more.
Also it's way better known in the web community, (don't know if it can be more easily be hacked). There is a price difference, especially that with ioncube you don't get one server license, but for me that works as well.

Migration of existing projects was done with quite low effort.

If you are using ioncube, zend guard or nucoder for ciphering purposes - you are doing it wrong. It takes less than several seconds for each file be uncrypted and reconverteed to the source code ... So it realy deos not matter. If you are using it for making php run much faster - then lack of 5.4 is also not a problem as 5.4 was dead almost in the day it went to the world.

Seti, you're wrong here. The tool you mentioned does re-engineer sources from php opcodes. Yes, this is possible (or php itself wouldn't be able to run the opcodes at all) but this is a) error prone, especially for complex statements b) can't recover names of the variables and some functions and class names if obfuscation is turned on.

Yes and now Dmitri - yes for names, no for errors. I saw many files decoded and so on - its a bit hard, to read, but after you rename them its ok. Anyway - NuCoder is faster than ioncube when it comes to read/run files so this is why i quite love it. Also not all pp have the decompiler so not all ppl would be even able to decode the files cheap (there are sites that offer that kind of work).

Did you try to decode for example Yii? You'll get absolutely useless sources. At least it's what I got. So yes, the decompiler is error prone. Compare this with other php encoders that encode sources they do not compile them. It means that sources can be extracted as is, absolutely correct as it does not require any reverse-engineering. More over the loader will extract the sources immediately befor executing them.