From a new posting on John Coggeshall's weblog today:

Today the public gets its first glance at this work with the alpha release of the BLENC extension in the PHP PECL Repository. To my knowledge this alpha should work on versions of PHP 4.3.0+ and higher, although honestly it was only tested in PHP 5.0 RC3." (Read more).

BLENC is an extension which hooks into the Zend Engine, allowing for transparent encryption and execution of PHP scripts using the blowfish algorithm. It is not designed for complete security (it is still possible to disassemble the script into op codes using a package such as XDebug), however it does keep people out of your code and make reverse engineering difficult.

Once an encrypted PHP script has been generated, the key to decrypt it must be stored in the key file in order for the PHP script to be executed. These keys are stored in the text file specified by the blenc.key_file php.ini configuration directive (one per line, default /usr/local/etc/blenckeys).

Sounds like this just might be the start of something good for all of us coders who want to protect their work...