Password protecting source code on a server

[parikrama]

We have recently developed a web application using Java Struts, JSP, and HTML. Presently the application is being hosted on a Windows Server on Tomkat Apache. Can the source code be encoded, or converted into an exe file. The reason being, currently anyone with access to the server can access and modify the source code. This is ok as long as the programming team is on the clients site. Once they leave the site, we have no control over the code.
Can this source code be encoded?. Need help please


Thanks

[stringplucker]

By what means are you deploying the source code to the site? Are you accessing the file system directly through Windows Explorer? Are you using an FTP server and client? This will dictate how you can limit access to the source files themselves. Obviously, when deployed in the actual filesystem you want all source files to be set to read only.

You can't really encode the source code. Seeing as how a web browser needs access to this to run your application. Obviously using JSP helps here, as all code specified within the appropriate jsp tags is compiled by Tomcat and only the output remains. Therefore, unless a rancom user has direct access to your file-system (which is very very bad) there is no way for them to obtain the source code (other than the outputted html).