The current trend in the application and web development industry is switching from compiled languages like C/C++ and Delphi to scripting languages like Perl, Javascript or VBScript. One of the main disadvantages of these languages for developers of commercial applications is the ease by which customers and competitors can study, analyze, and resuse the source code.

For custom solutions the risk of losing control over intellectual property is much higher since its much more difficult to track violations of intellectual property due to the highly targeted or even exclusive distribution of such solutions or products. In such cases violations of intellectual property can take the form of reuse of the original source code even with an arbitrary level of adaptation.

Due to the ease by which source code can be studied and modified it is extremely difficult to ensure licensing conditions of the applications or sites are met (for example permission to use the script only on a single website, and only until a specified date occurs).

Stunnix JavaScript Obfuscator is a unique solution for this piracy and misuse problem for code written in ECMAScript or JavaScript programming languages. Its both an encoding and an obfuscation tool for JavaScript source code in .js files and in PHP, HTML, ASP and JSP pages and provides advanced support for adding difficult to remove automatic licensing checks.

JavaScript Obfuscator converts scripts from input files into a highly mangled and obfuscated form. This makes them extermely difficult to study, analyse, reuse and re-work for competitors or customers, while fully retaining the functionality of the original code. By default that highly mangled and obfuscated code is encoded afterwards to hide the structure (control flow, division into subroutines and classes) of the script completely.

JavaScript Obfuscator is not a compiler to machine or pseudo code - the protected form will still be the usual script, thus it will work on all platforms the original code worked on. State of the art support for ensuring license conditions (expiration, several types of hostname checks, user-defined checks) is also available. Note, that Stunnix JavaScript Obfuscator is referred to as Stunnix JS-Obfus for brevity in some places on this site.

The obfuscation of raw JavaScript code means
· Replacing symbol names with non-meaningfull ones
· Replacing numeric constants with expressions
· Replacing characters in strings with their hex escapes
· Removing or obfuscation of comments
· Removing spaces and tabs in the lines of code
· Joining all lines in your code
· Encoding the result of previous stages

Besides obfuscation of raw JavaScript code mentioned above, the following ADDITIONAL protection is applied to web documents
· All JavaScript code inside tags is obfuscated
· Code inside attributes (e.g. onclick) is obfuscated
· HTML comments are removed from the output (but server-side markup like SSI is not)
· Extra spaces and line breaks are removed intelligently
· Unique! The content of documents and the content of attribute values are partially converted into entities in a random way
· Unique! The case of letters in tag and attribute names is randomly mixed

Features of "Stunnix JavaScript Obfuscator":

· Unique! It can compress names of local variables (like YUI Compressor does) while obfuscating (or keeping the same) names of all other symbols; names of local variables can also be mangled after compressing them to get more cryptic code
· Unique! JavaScript Obfuscator is cross-platform product, it can be easily installed and used on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris or any other Unix OS.
· Unique! By default encoding of JavaScript code is applied to the result of obfuscation performed by JavaScript Obfuscator
· Unique! JavaScript Obfuscator has support for JavaScript expiration, binding to server and user-implemented licensing checks with standard or user-specified actions (such as showing alerts)
· Unique! JavaScript Obfuscator includes Obfuscation Project Manager - an advanced intuitive cross-platform (Windows, MacOS X, Linux and Unix) graphical user interface for protecting any size project created with JavaScript with mixed types of code (client-side and server-side), complete with with IDE-like functionality (supporting Build, Rebuild Changed, Clean)
· It can extract symbols for any API - just provide a directory with the files defining API
· Unique! Protect JavaScript inside string constants in any file with any programming language - Java, C/C++, C# or Pascal
· Unique! JavaScript Obfuscator has special debugging mode and unique tools to generate a list of symbols that cant be changed, saving development time.
· Unique! JavaScript Obfuscator supports several advanced ways to generate obfuscated names including using shortest possible name.
· JavaScript Obfuscator supports all JavaScript syntax constructs, including inline regexps and statements terminated with newlines
· JavaScript Obfuscator has state of the art support for the obfuscation and encoding of client-side and server-side JavaScript scripts embedded into HTML, PHP, ASP and ASP.NET, WSH/WSC and of course in raw files.
· Unique! JavaScript Obfuscator also can protect html, php, .asp and .jsp and other files that dont contain any scripts at all!
· Unique! JavaScript Obfuscator has support for obfuscating dynamic JavaScript code inside string arguments of "print()" calls and the like
· Unique! Full support for projects consisting of several JavaScript files and use of eval
· Unique! Many options to tightly control the obfuscation and encoding of JavaScript Obfuscator
· Unique! Ability to watermark JavaScript and to make the study of changes between versions of the same file more difficult
· Unique! JavaScript Obfuscator allows creation of lists of symbols that shouldnt be modified; Many exception tables for standard interfaces are included
· Obfuscated and/or encoded code runs on any JavaScript interpreter
· Unique! Full support for JavaScript.NET and ECMAScript

Changes from previous version

· Big improvements in HTML parsing
· Greatly improved support for huge input files
· Implemented "delimited" extractor for JavaScript. Now JavaScript can be protected inside file with custom structure, provided its surrounded by any of the strings specified inside special files ("file with prefixes" and "file with suffixes"). The code can be optionally xml-decoded before protection and xml-encoded after protection.