In 2002 ionCube introduced tools to protect software written using the PHP programming language from being viewed, changed, and run on unlicensed computers. The encoding technology grew out of earlier work on the PHP Accelerator project, and at first launch included an online encoding service where PHP scripts can be uploaded and an encoded version downloaded in return. The tools use the technique of compiling to bytecode prior to encoding so that source code is eliminated, and runtime overheads are reduced.