Do you obfuscate your commercial Java code? [closed]

Answer 1

I use proguard for JavaME development. It's not only very very good at making jar files smaller (Essential for mobile) but it is useful as a nicer way of doing device-specific code without resorting to IDE-unfriendly preprocessing tools such as antenna.

E.g.

public void doSomething()
{
    /* Generated config class containing static finals: */
    if (Configuration.ISMOTOROLA)
    {
        System.out.println("This is a motorola phone");
    }
    else
    {
        System.out.println("This is not a motorola phone");
    }
}

This gets compiled, obfuscated, and the class file ends up as though you had written:

public void doSomething()
{
    System.out.println("This is a motorola phone");
}

So you can have variants of code to work around manufacturer bugs in JVM/library implementations without bulking out the final executable class files.

I believe that some commercial obfuscators can also merge class files together in certain cases. This is useful because the more classes you have, the larger the size overhead you have in the zip (jar) file.