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Ioncube and PHP 8

 1 year ago
source link: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1871691
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  1. Ioncube and PHP 8

    It looks like ioncube has pretty much just shut down all public facing support unless you pay. No more forums as of April 1 (horrible April Fools Day joke to pull on your customers), and a year and a half later, still not a word on PHP 8 support, despite 11 being released (new "major update") in November
    Has anyone heard anything about php 8 and ioncube? Seems like this is pretty much dead in the water right now!
    Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
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  2. I've been following this as well. I'm not really sure if Ioncube is really shutting down and becoming abandoned ware - but they're getting real close.

    There's really no excuse for PHP 8 support to take this long.

    Ioncube is (was) a major player in PHP development. They should have started working on an encoder the moment PHP 8 went into alpha stage and stayed working on it through it's full release. But they didn't do that.

    Projects that depend on Ioncube - like WHMCS - really need to move away from Ioncube, at least that's my opinion.

    If I recall, Ioncube did the same thing when PHP 7.0 was released, although the delay wasn't any where near as long as this PHP 8.0 delay is.


    What other PHP encoders are there? I know there's Sourceguardian. There's phpBolt - but I don't see a lot of discussion about it. Are there others?
  3. Quote Originally Posted by SPaReK
    like WHMCS
    The best bit with WHMCS is how its system health check feature warns about PHP 7.4 usage, yet that's the only available version we can use because of this very problem...
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  4. This isn't only about WHMCS - I'm sure there are other projects that depend on Ioncube for encoding. WHMCS would just seem to be the big one in terms of the web hosting industry.

    I don't deem this as necessarily the fault of WHMCS. The only fault WHMCS should have is perhaps their dependence on Ioncube. But they probably were assuming that Ioncube would eventually release an encoder for PHP 8. But I think that time has passed. I really think it's time for WHMCS to look at other encoders. Any project that uses Ioncube needs to be considering other encoders.

    When Ioncube starts losing money or really has to fold up (if they haven't already) because of cash in flow, maybe they will look back at this and realize that they should have beefed up their development a lot sooner on these PHP releases.
  5. Quote Originally Posted by SPaReK
    I'm not really sure if Ioncube is really shutting down and becoming abandoned ware - but they're getting real close.
    I thought the same thing until I saw that they’d updated and released version 11. They claim the shift to remote work hurt them, but if that’s the case they were poorly off in the beginning
    Quote Originally Posted by SPaReK
    There's really no excuse for PHP 8 support to take this long.
    Fully agreed . There’s also no excuse for just shutting down your only customer facing, public support area. Unless you’ve got something to hide
    Quote Originally Posted by SPaReK
    They should have started working on an encoder the moment PHP 8 went into alpha stage
    I would give them at least till RC, because changes can be rather drastic during aloha and beta . However, even there, nope
    Quote Originally Posted by SPaReK
    What other PHP encoders are there?
    People who have invested time and money into ioncube don’t care about other products. We simply want the product we paid for to work in an up to date environment
    Quote Originally Posted by SPaReK
    When Ioncube starts losing money or really has to fold up (if they haven't already) because of cash in flow, maybe they will look back at this and realize that they should have beefed up their development a lot sooner on these PHP releases.
    Honestly, I think this is why they released 11 without 8 in it. Problem is that customers know they’ll likely have to pay again, so they’re holding off upgrading. 11 seems to be a pretty weak release , feature wise
    Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
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  6. Quote Originally Posted by whmcsguru
    No more forums as of April 1 (horrible April Fools Day joke to pull on your customers), and a year and a half later, still not a word on PHP 8 support, despite 11 being released (new "major update") in November
    Has anyone heard anything about php 8 and ioncube? Seems like this is pretty much dead in the water right now!
    Actually, they publish this on April 19 and then later backdated the blog entry to April 1 eek.gif. The support forums closure was last weekend.

    The last update they posted on their forum was:
    “There is an internal timeline but no public date for 8.1 support yet as it would not be accurate.”

    I guess their previous announced timeline (between 6-12 months) is no longer valid.

  7. Ioncube and PHP 8

    So, they’re just skipping 8 altogether.

    More excuses and lies from these guys . I swear
    Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
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  8. There's another product I use encoded with IonCube and the devs are just as frustrated with them. They want to move to PHP 8 ASAP but are being held back. They're looking at alternatives as a stop gap until IonCube figures out what they're doing.
    Travis Newton
    NodeSpace Hosting, a Xinsto, LLC company
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  9. For me, it’s less about moving to PHP8. It’s more about trust. I mean, when a company pulls what these guys have, shuts down public support, refuses to state when things will be available, and takes this long to actually deliver a product… Can they even be trusted any longer?
    Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
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  10. To be honest, I have not much faith in them either. The support forum was an important part of their website. Instead of interacting with their paying customers, they decided to shut down their forums. Then they claim that the problem was the old phpBB version.

    Is it so difficult to upgrade phpBB to a newer version? Why was this blog posting backdated to April 1st?
  11. Yeah, I laughed when I read that excuse . The lamest thing ever. Who knows why they backdated it, it just lends to the lack of trust here

    Ioncube had a great thing going. After the demise of Zend, they were the top dogs . They could have easily kept their code up to date, but the signs have been there for a few years

    Who knows who will replace them in the long run, but ion is, for all intents and purposes , dead at this point . Putting your business in their hands is just ridiculously stupid
    Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
    Linux problems? WHMCS Problems? Give me a shout
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  12. Hi guys,
    my company uses ioncube and I was in touch with a person from their team (through paid support) about 5 weeks ago.
    He told me the plan is to support PHP 8.1 by the end of June 2022.
    Of course I don't know if this will happen; I don't know, if this is true, why they don't say it publicly and I don't know why they shut down the forum.

    Best,

    E
  13. That’s great news, though I honestly don’t believe it .

    Not that I am saying YOU are lying, you’re likely passing along info accurately, but THEY have said this time and again .
    Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
    Linux problems? WHMCS Problems? Give me a shout
    Check out my WHMCS Addons
  14. @whmcsguru: What's your take on how WHMCS is gonna weather all of this?


    We've got a test deployment of WHMCS setup to try and integrate EasyDCIM (due to glaring design flaws in EasyDCIM's panel offering). While trying to strip WHMCS down to a just dumb panel to just serve one module isn't working well, we did have distinct concerns regarding PHP compatibility/IonCube in the middle of the "screwing around" initial phases.

    The fact WHMCS has the gall to complain about an EOL PHP version on install, I found to be quite amusing, to say the least!
    Myles Loosley-Millman - [email protected]
    Priority Colo Inc. - Affordable Colocation & Dedicated Servers.
    Two Canadian facilities serving Toronto & Markham, Ontario
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  15. In the end most of this is about WHMCS relying on this BS in the first place, so....
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  16. It's been so long that I cannot even remember what piece of software used it, but IonCube is one of the biggest pains to use I have ever encountered. I am now at the point that I would flat out refuse to install or support use of any software that requires IonCube.
  17. Quote Originally Posted by Mike_A
    In the end most of this is about WHMCS relying on this BS in the first place, so....
    What do you expect them to use sourceguardian or something? That's not as widely available in my opinion.
    Mark Muyskens // Sales and Support Supervisor
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  18. Quote Originally Posted by Mark Muyskens
    What do you expect them to use sourceguardian or something? That's not as widely available in my opinion.
    Their whole business being locked down to ionCube is bull tbh. Sure, SourceGuardian, it is a popular alternative and their development team is alive and well. Alternatively, considering WHMCS price increase and investment money, I'm certain they could develop a basic alternative if they liked.
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  19. Why is phpBolt never talked about as an alternative? I mean that as an actual question.

    I don't really distribute any of the projects I code - they're mostly for internal company use - so I don't ever have to encode anything.

    It does require a PHP module to be installed, but that's no different than Ioncube and SourceGuardian.
  20. This is the email i get from IonCube

    Hi,

    Thanks for contacting us and we're looking at approximately the end of June for PHP 8.1 support though no release date has been confirmed yet.

    Kind Regards,
    Ben
    --
    ionCube Support
  21. Quote Originally Posted by SPaReK
    Why is phpBolt never talked about as an alternative?
    Closed-source encoding format without any clear form of monetization by the author. I'd rather go with SourceGuardian if ionCube can't get things together come July. Knowing I'm paying for a service makes it somewhat easier to load a compiled third-party extension.
    Apis Networks: engineered hosting
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  22. Quote Originally Posted by elend
    Closed-source encoding format without any clear form of monetization by the author. I'd rather go with SourceGuardian if ionCube can't get things together come July. Knowing I'm paying for a service makes it somewhat easier to load a compiled third-party extension.
    It really does give one an uneasy feeling about it. They claim you can retrieve the source to it:
    Contribute and support github.com. Fork code from GitHub then make changes and create a pull request.
    Of course the github.com link goes literally to https://github.com/ not the source. A bit of digging I think it's supposed to link here: https://github.com/dedi74132/phpbolt but it doesn't even contain the source and just sends you to https://phpbolt.com/wp-content/uploads/ which is a directory listing.
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  23. Yep, this is no good considering I really need JIT.

    I guess we'll have to watch for 8.1 update.
    Specially 4 U
    .
    JoneSolutions.Com is on the net 24/7 providing stable and reliable web hosting solutions, server management and services since 2001
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  24. Will JIT even work with ionCube encoded scripts? The current version of ionCube has no support for OPcache.
  25. Quote Originally Posted by PLE
    Will JIT even work with ionCube encoded scripts? The current version of ionCube has no support for OPcache.
    Likely no. Unless that’s what’s been holding the whole thing back, supporting OPcache ?
    Tom Whiting, WHMCS Guru extraordinaire
    Linux problems? WHMCS Problems? Give me a shout
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