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Cool Tools 16: JD-GUI Java Decompiler

There was a spirited discussion in the comments for our .NET decompiler post (hey, 2 comments is close to the record for this blog!), and this is long overdue, but in the past year, I’ve become a fanatic user of Emmanuel Dupuy’s JD-GUI Java Decompiler.  It’s free, it works, and it has the ability to decompile entire Java .jar files at once, saving all the source in a folder structure that matches the original source/package names.

The package export capability is excellent when you’d like to see what has changed between portal releases; you just decompile the WCI code before and after, and use Beyond Compare to highlight the differences between builds.

JD-GUI has been my tool of choice for many posts on this blog, and if you’re into getting down and dirty with your WebCenter Interaction Java code, I highly recommend this bad boy:

JD-GUI is a free download here, but I suggest throwing these guys a couple bucks for the donationware.  C’mon, 20 bucks, anyone?  (before you ask, yes, I contributed to the cause..)

 

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2011 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Cool Tools, Integryst. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Cool Tools 16: JD-GUI Java Decompiler”

  1. Nasko says:
    April 4, 2011 at 2:26 am

    DJ Java Decompiler offers more tools: http://members.fortunecity.com/neshkov/dj.html

    Reply
    • Matt Chiste says:
      April 4, 2011 at 7:54 am

      I gave up on DJ a long time ago. Their licensing is much more onerous; you have to actually contact them and get a license file which only works on a single machine – aside from the pain of not just getting a regular license key immediately, this didn’t work for me because I have a separate Virtual Machine for each of my clients and this requires a separate key for each. Give it a shot, but proceed at your own risk before plunking down any cash on this one.

      Reply
  2. Prabhu says:
    April 5, 2011 at 3:51 pm

    lol, you stole my blog post idea :-). But this is a really cool tool. I gave up on JAD and DJD some time back and stumbled upon this and have been using every since

    Reply
  3. Lee says:
    April 6, 2011 at 5:38 am

    Be wary of what JD produces, it gets ternary operators completely wrong.

    http://java.decompiler.free.fr/?q=node/483 says it’s fixed in JD-Core 0.5.5 (associated with JD-Eclipse 0.1.4) but the latest available JD-Eclipse is 0.1.3.
    The latest JD-GUI (0.3.3) is supposedly built on JD-Core 0.6.0 but still gets it wrong.

    Reply

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