Ioncube
Encyclopedia
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
ionCube was founded in 2002, and introduced tools to protect software written using the PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
programming language from being viewed, changed, and run on unlicensed computers. The encoding technology grew out of earlier work on the PHP Accelerator project, and at first launch included an online encoding
Semantics encoding
A semantics encoding is a translation between formal languages. For programmers, the most familiar form of encoding is the compilation of a programming language into machine code or byte-code. Conversion between document formats are also forms of encoding. Compilation of TeX or LaTeX documents to...
service where PHP scripts can be uploaded and an encoded version downloaded in return, and a command line tool for Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
soon after. The tools use the technique of compiling
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
to bytecode
Bytecode
Bytecode, also known as p-code , is a term which has been used to denote various forms of instruction sets designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter as well as being suitable for further compilation into machine code...
prior to encoding so that source code is eliminated, and runtime overheads are reduced. A PHP extension
Extension (computing)
Software extension, is a file containing programming that serves to extend the capabilities of or data available to a more basic program. It is a kind of list of commands which are directly included in the program. This term often coincides with the plug-in...
called the ionCube Loader handles the reading and execution of encoded files at run time.
The encoding products were subsequently ported to FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
, Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
and Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
, and the range of products expanded to offer additional features such as product licensing and encryption of non-PHP files. In July 2004 a Windows GUI was introduced, no longer requiring use of the command line for Windows users.
In 2004, ionCube introduced their Package Foundry product, IPF, for Linux and Windows. IPF allowed web applications to be packaged as a Windows executable installer that would automatically deploy the web application to a remote server, as well as performing various installation and configuration tasks, and launching the browser on the main page of the installed application.
ionCube also produce a product called the Bundler. Unrelated to PHP, the Bundler is a Windows and Linux tool to produce self-extracting archives for Windows.
In December 2010 ionCube released version 7.0 of their Encoder.