best obfuscator

[schw]

Hi

which of the following obfuscators is the "best" you think?

ProGuardProGuard

ProGuard

JODE

JavaGuard

RetroGuard

yGuard

cheers
paw

 

[Daniel Pitts]

Hi

which of the following obfuscators is the "best" you think?

ProGuardProGuard

ProGuard

JODE

JavaGuard

RetroGuard

yGuard

cheers
paw

None. If you feel the need to obfuscate your code, then you probably
aren't a very experience programmer. And that being the case, your
code is either not worth steal, and/or already obfuscated.

 

[Chris Uppal]

which of the following obfuscators is the "best" you think?

[...]
None. If you feel the need to obfuscate your code, then you probably
aren't a very experience programmer.

So why do Sun use obfuscation ?

(I'm thinking of the COM.rsa.* classes in jsse.jar up through 1.4.2. Though,
to be fair, I think it may actually have been RSA doing the obfuscation[*]).

Obfuscation has it's place, I think. A small place, to be sure, but it's not
useless (if you don't expect magic from it).

As for the OP's question, I have no real idea which is best. I doubt whether
JODE is up to much (too old to understand the bytecode sequences generated by
modern versions of javac).

-- chris

[*] Qualification: I have just noticed that Preemptive claim that Sun used
their DashO Pro product "to obfuscate the encryption libraries as part of the
JDK", so maybe it was Sun's choice after all...

 

[Daniel Dyer]

None. If you feel the need to obfuscate your code, then you probably
aren't a very experience programmer. And that being the case, your
code is either not worth steal, and/or already obfuscated.

Obfuscation may not be as useful as some people would believe but it's
certainly not worthless. Besides the marginal protection it gives to your
intellecutal property (your intellect, your employer's property), a key
benefit is the shrinking that can be achieved. It is not unusual to
reduce the size of compiled code by up to 50% by running it through an
obfuscator. This shrinking is all but essential for J2ME development
where storage is limited and downloads are often paid for by the
kilobyte. While not as critical for JavaSE, it can still reduce the
download times of applets and web-start applications.

Dan.

 

[Alex Hunsley]

None. If you feel the need to obfuscate your code, then you probably
aren't a very experience programmer.

That's possible. On the other hand you could be a perfectly good
programmer, and one who understands that obfuscation provides a smaller
resulting bytecode, which is very useful sometimes (e.g. J2ME).

 

[Guest]

which of the following obfuscators is the "best" you think?

ProGuardProGuard

ProGuard

JODE

JavaGuard

RetroGuard

yGuard

ProGuard is OK. I have only looked at a couple of the
others, so OK does not imply best.

Arne