Compiled PHP Script

PHP script are usually naked, but sometimes we need to capsulating out script for security reason or commercial. There is many way to hide our script, we can use Base 64 Encoding combined with Inflate Compression function and other PHP function that can be reversed. This is the only reason why we need to avoid encrypt the code using PHP function. Every encrypted script need to decrypt first before they run. What should we do is just set a tricky scenario to encrypt and or decrypt back.

I’ve try to using compiled PHP script. I use Bambalam PHP EXE Compiler/Embedder, a light and fast compiler to bundling our PHP script including library, CSS, and external file, except image, sound, and other multimedia file.

There is many way to invoking our compiled script. We can put them into CGI or just execute them using PHP shell execution function (read the PHP Documentation).

We should design a n-Tier PHP application, then assuming we have a web server with PHP, an application server, and a database server. In this case, an application server is used to put our compiled PHP script and external library. Classes wrote in PHP script that we’ve compiled. Some of our class is used to accessing database server and then compiled class script sent back to web server to displaying the result. So here, a web server is used to show user interface.

I think this way is secure enough to hide our PHP script.

Recognize Text & Objects in Graphical Images with PHP

An OCR with PHP ? it doesn’t sounds very common topic for PHP developers, but Andrey Kucherenko from Ukraine have made a very interesting project to realize the first phpOCR. His classes can recognize text in monochrome graphical images after a training phase. The training phase is necessary to let the class build recognition data structures from images that have known characters. The training data structures are used during the recognition process to attempt to identify text in real images using the corner algorithm.

PHPOCR have win the PHPClasses innovation awards of march 2006, and it shows the power of what could be implemented with PHP5.

Certain types of applications require reading text from documents that are stored as graphical images. That is the case of scanned documents.

An OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool can be used to recover the original text that is written in scanned documents. These are sophisticated tools that are trained to recognize text in graphical images.

This class provides a base implementation for an OCR tool. It can be trained to learn how to recognize each letter drawn in an image. Then it can be used to recognize longer texts in real documents.