{Spam?} [ale] (reasonably) mature GUI solutions in Linux

[Bjorn Dittmer-Roche]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Irv Mullins wrote:

> On Monday 15 September 2003 11:50 am, Jason Day wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 06:49:58AM -0400, John Wells wrote:
> ...
> > I've always assumed the compiled python files were
> > > really just for optimization and were pretty easy to reverse
> > > engineer...is this not the case?
> >
> > Java is the same way.  I don't know about python, but there are tons of
> > decompilers for Java, both free and commercial.  There are even plugins
> > for most of the Java IDEs to decompile a .class file and open it as an
> > editable .java file in the editor.
> >
> > There are obfuscators, of course, but they can only do so much.  The
> > bottom line is, it's not very difficult to get a .java file from a
> > .class file.
>
> The trick used by, for example, Euphoria is to mangle variable and function
> names, reorganize the program flow, and encode strings so that it would take
> a skilled programmer much longer to "decompile" the byte code and make a
> minor change than it would take the same programmer to write a new program
> which performs the same functions.

Can't you just remove the debugging symbols (an option to javac) or is it
worse than that (I guess you need function names, don't you)? Another
option for java is to compile to machine code using one of many packages
available for that. Unfortunately gcj, the linux/gnu java to machine
compiler doesn't do guis yet. Can anyone reccomend an obfuscator for java?


	bjorn

PS why is {spam} in this subject heading?