February 13, 2004

jad

If you've never used jad then you're missing out on a great tool. Jad lets you easily decompile java class files. It may be shady legally, depending on what contracts you've signed, but it's definitely useful in debugging and understanding behavior of java applications. It couldn't be simpler to use. Just run

jad classfile.class

from the command line, and you get a java file (named classfile.java) in the same directory. The names of the variables aren't fantastic (s1, s2...) but it sure beats reading the bytecode output of javap -c.

Note, it's free for noncommercial use, but if you want to use it commercially, contact the author for terms. And if you get a chance to download it from the above tripod.com link, grab it and store it someplace else, because the page often is unavailable due to its exceeding bandwidth limits.

Posted by moore at February 13, 2004 02:01 PM
Comments

Iam from Indoesia, Iam still Problem with "How to recreating *.jad to *.class
eg. Menupopup.jad to menupopup.class
Thank alot for y Information

Posted by: Arief Marwan at May 19, 2004 01:44 AM | Permalink

I've sometimes had better results with Jode than with Jad. As far as I know these are the two actively maintained open Java decompilers.

Posted by: David Byrne at August 2, 2004 06:45 AM | Permalink
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