Hide source code in PHP GTK - php

i have a peculiar question.
Iam developing a php GTK2 desktop application, and my purpose is to hide the source code from the client, to whom i will handle the desktop application (deploy in his system), once it is completed.
Our motto is to enable the client to run the application, without the need for a browser.
I have heard about tools like ioncube encoder that can encrypt the php source code.
I want the same functionality to be achieved with the GTK application.
Others must not be able to see the source code. How can this be achieved ?

If you want to go the paid for route, ioncube seems good. I've found a nice article that explains this and gives you some options - it seems like Zend has the best solution if you go by price.
http://www.zubrag.com/articles/php-source-code-encoders-and-protectors.php
I hope this helps you.

I have never heard of a good free solution for this.
There is a couple of vendors providing tools to do this. By googling I found this page that presents different solutions:
http://www.seocompany.ca/software/free-encryption-software.html
I think the Alladin usb key encryption system is one of the most robust one, but not free.
And you can also make a copy of your code and remove all comments, use only non-explicit variable names etc, so that even if your customer breaks the encryption, it would still be hard to understand the code...
Hope this helps!
P

Related

Debug PHP Using WAMP and an IDE

I recently started web development. The course I took was to install WAMP and start developing right away. I used an atom text editor, this -combined with wamp- proved to be a very fast way to write client-side code(HTML, CSS, Javascript).
But when I started to write serverside PHP things got a little messy. I should probably explain my site's structure here.
I keep separate PHP, CSS, javascript files for every page on the client side, for the server side a have 2 different types of PHP files:
Files that only perform a specific operation on the database(For example returning "5 more answers"). These are always called by AJAX requests.
Files that load the page for the first time. These are only used when the user opens the page for the first time, they do necessary database queries and return the page. Later requests always go to the 1st type of PHP files.
Now regarding my problem. I debugged until now by printing variables to the screen with var_dump() or echoing. But this started to become too slow as the data I work with grew. I wonder if there is a way of debugging which will let me but a breakpoint in one of my PHP files. Then, when I open it on the browser, on the localhost I created using WAMP, will let me go through the PHP file step by step.
I have been dealing with this issue for 3 days, I tried to make it work with Eclipse IDE but couldn't find a way. Also, there seems to be no tutorials or Q&A on the internet regarding the issue.
Breakpoint debugging opens a whole new world, and is the natural step after var_dump() debugging. Not only does it speed up development, but it provides much more information about your code, as you can step through each line and see what values have been set at each step, and how they evolve as your program executes its code. This means you can track the entirety of the values at different stages with one run - imagine tracking all variables at each point using var_dump()!
Although choosing an IDE is a personal decision based on personal taste, i strongly recommend you try out PhpStorm. If you can get a student licence go for it.
PhpStorm has extensive documentation & tutorials on all features in the IDE, debugging is no exception:
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/configuring-xdebug.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GokeXqI93x8
I don't know of a specific solution to your issue. I'm not exactly sure what you're doing but as a quick tip, I find add the following snippet to the top of the file useful as it will highly error more easily rather than browser just say nope.
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 'On');
Hope this help you a bit.
I tried out what's recommended in comments and answers. I first tried Netbeans. To be fair it disappointed me. Download kept getting stuck at 100%, even for different versions. When I stopped downloading and went ahead to create a php project, there was missing parts I guess. I couldn't even manage to create a php project. But that might just be me not being able to do it.
Then I followed #leuquim's answer and #Alex Howansky's comment and downloaded PHPStorm. And I got it to work in no more than 20 minutes. I downloaded it with a student's licence. For people who want to use PHPStorm with WAMP here's a Youtube tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxX4vnZFbZU
One thing to note in the video is that, maker of the video chooses PHP Web Application in the Run Configurations. That has been changed to PHP Web Page.

PHP un-editable pdf/file export option

I am developing an application in the Kohana PHP framework that assesses performance. The end result of the process is a webpage listing the overall scoring and a color coded list of divs and results.
The original idea was to have the option to save this as a non-editable PDF file and email the user. After further research I have found this to be non as straight forward as I hoped.
The best solution seemed to be installing the unix application wkhtmltopdf but as the destination is shared hosting I am unable to install this on the server.
My question is, what's the best option to save a non editable review of the assessment to the user?
Thank you for help with this.
I guess the only way to generate a snapshot, or review how you call it, is by storing it on the server side and only grant access via a read only protocol. So basically by offering it as a 'web page'.
Still everyone can save and modify the markup. But that is the case for every file you generate, regardless of the type of file. Ok, maybe except DRM infected files. But you don't want to do that, trust me.
Oh, and you could also print the files. Printouts are pretty hard to be edited. Though even that is not impossible...
I found a PHP version that is pre-built as a Kohana Module - github.com/ryross/pdfview

Tools to understand website source code

I recently had a website developed by an external source. They gave me the source code as well as sql files.
When I extract the source code I see folders like Smarty, fckeditor and many php files. I want to start editing these as I find it to be the best way to learn. What tool should I use. I tried using trial version of PHPdesigner, but it just doesnt open my php files.
Is there any tool that can take all these files in the form of a project and simultaneously show me a visual display of any changes that I make.
I suppose it is very clear that I am new to this. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Just use simple text editor with some code highlight like Notepad++
It is free to use, very fast and it does what you need.
First of all try to know what are the different file types and which lanuguage are those targeted to. Once you know that you can then decide on the editor.
What i recommend is you try to find out if they used a framework for the website, something like CakePHP or CodeIgniter. The next step after you find out is to go the framework website and start reading the documentation.
If the site id developed in php most likely any type of WYSIWYG editing is going to inaccurate. This is because a number of different files need to be processed and combined by the php interpreter before they come together to make any given page or view. Thus the only way to really preview is to run it on a server. Since you say there are sql files he has laso used a DB to store something so most likely any changes you would need to make are going to be spread between both the php source files and the records in the db.
Aptana (Which is Eclipse based) is great at handling many different file type in one IDE. I would use Studio 2 w/ the plugins you need or if you feel cutting edge try Studio 3. It's cross platform so Linux/Windows or OSX.

Find PHP Orphan Page

I've inherited a PHP application that has "versions" of pages (viewacct.php, viewacct2.php, viewacct_rcw.php, etc). I want to discover which of these pages are called from other pages in the application and which are not. Is there a tool available that will help with that?
Using whatever tools you would like (Find/Grep/Sed on Linux, I use Visual Studio on windows), it is just a matter of crawling your source tree for references of the filenames in each file.
Similar to FlySwat's answer: any good text editor or IDE with multi-file search should be able to help you find the orphan pages. On Mac OS X I would suggest TextWrangler(free), TextMate($), or BBEdit($$). I've had good success with each of these tools, but your mileage may vary.
If you wish to find out what pages are called by other pages, you need to look at where stuff is being called. Obviously in php code, you can only reference other files via includes or requires and the singular versions of those functions.
So if I were you I would grep your code for include and then require and attempt to make some kind of map showing what is calling what. Eventually you should end up with a pretty clear map of how the php files talk to each other. Then you will need to work out how the various points of the application talk to each other from there via HTML/AJAX etc.
Good luck. I have done it before, it takes a while, but you'll get there, just make sure you document what you find out.
You may want to try out nWire for PHP.
nWire for PHP is an innovative Eclipse plugin (works with Eclipse PDT & Zend Studio 7) which accelerates PHP development by helping developers navigate through their code and better understand the architecture of their application. nWire offers unique tools for real time code visualization, navigation and search.
nWire analyzes all the components and associations in your project. While opening a file you can immediately see where (and if) it is being used.

Web Page Screenshots with PHP?

I know there is not a direct way to take a screen shot of a web page with PHP. What would be the most straightforward way to accomplish this? Are there any command line tools that could do this that I might be able to execute from a PHP script (I'm thinking something that would run in a 'NIX OS (OS X and/or Linux in particular)?
Edit: Or maybe some sort of web service I could access via SOAP or REST or ...
Edit #2: I found a related question discussing the CLI option, but I'd still be open to other methods if anyone knows of anything.
See webkit2png for an OSX commandline program that does this.
The page also mentions Linux alternatives.
[edit]: wkhtml2image is the newest kid in town, and it works better then anything else i've ever used.
[edit2]: As of 2014, PhantomJS seems to be the way to go, as it has the newest webkit version of the alternatives I know about.
[edit3]: In 2019, Puppeteer is the way to go. Official headless chrome, always up to date.
You can use the GD functions imagegrabscreen() or imagegrabwindow() to take a screenshot, but they're only available on Windows at the moment.
http://www.thumbshots.org/
html2ps does a decent job for relatively simple pages, and it requires very little in terms of external binaries, meaning it's very easy to install/use. If you control the pages you'll be capturing, then you can ensure that they'll render appropriately in html2ps. If you're hoping to capture arbitrary URLs, however, I'm not sure that the PHP port of HTML2PS is up to the task. It's also not the fastest thing in the world (expect render times in the seconds for complex pages), but that doesn't really matter for some applications.
Not sure if this would be enough for you, because it has some added stuff there, but would be worth giving it a try: http://www.snap.com
It's possible to get a base64 encoded image of a site by using the Google pagespeed api.
You can specify desktop or mobile views, but you are limited to an image of a certain size.

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