On Thu, 2002-01-31 at 04:06, Manuel Lemos wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Alain Samoun wrote:
> >
> > Manuel:
> > In all fairness to the Zend people, you can get the compiler for $600/year
> > or $50 per month.
>
> The unlimited Zend Encoder Unlimited costs $2400. Actually, I don't see
> any other Zend Encoder purchase option.
>
> Anyway, like a lot of other PHP users, I am not interested in expensive
> commercial solutions, even less those that tie me to those products
> indefinetly. If people want to pay such fees to be fair to Zend or just
> to believe that what they got is good because it costed a lot of money,
> fine it is their problem. Now, it is true that a lot of people choose
> PHP because it is a free and easy solution for their developments but
> inlike with other languages there is no way to distribute a closed
> source version of their software.
>
> That is the proposal. This is about PHP, not Zend Encoder or comercial
> solutions. If people wanted to use Zend Encoder or any other commercial
> solutions, this thread would not have been even started.
>
> > If it still look too expansive to you, compared to the free perl compiler,
> > there is also a perl compiler that costs $5,000...
>
> Alain, be serious, Java compilers cost nothing. I know for a fact that a
> lot of people are discarding PHP because there is not an officially
> supported and free solution to compiler and distribute PHP application
> binaries when in Java and other languages that is a natural thing.
>
> This means that people drop PHP when they realize that it isn't as easy
> to protect their code to sell their applications. Until PHP developers
> realize that it is important to make it easy for PHP users to sell their
> applications, PHP will be seen as a less appealing solution.
>
> > Also, someone may be able to reverse the PHP code to C and create an exe
> > with it (like Perl) . And last, but maybe the future: Web Services with
> > SOAP?
>
> It should be not be that hard. There are Java bytecode to C converters,
> it should not be hard to make Zend bytecode to C conversion.
Wishful thinking? :-)
Unless I'm mistaken, Java doesn't have eval. Any language with eval
needs a runtime environment when executing, even if the rest of the code
is converted to C.
- Stig