PHP Byctecode

[frozenade]

Hi. I am new in PHP programming.
Just wondering to know. Why people always getting rush to protect their PHP script by encrypt it (Zend Encode, ionCube, etc) or create their self encoding technique such as base64 use (which able to decoded), instead there is a bytecode function (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.bcompiler.php) to convert PHP script into bytecode which readable directly by PHP engine? Will all encryption and encoding software or method are gonna be replaced by bytecode function?

Thanks for the information.

[Fou-Lu]

Bytecode compiling is still fairly easy to reverse compile, much like javacode. Not that it makes any difference really, depends on what your doing.
Most clients I've seen contract for source code. For that reason, I would probably never encrypt my code. *shrugs* guess its really up to the coder.

[firepages]

the bcompiler whilst interesting has some limitations, read the manual comments, from my early forays with it had a lot of issues with conditional DEFINES etc.