After taking a much-needed break, I’m back programming Java. Much to my surprise, I’m enjoying it. However, there is still one wound that time hasn’t healed: JAR files without source.
Oh, the hair I’ve pulled out, staring at Javadoc, trying to divine whether a function returns null or empty array to indicate no-result! The co-workers I’ve disturbed swearing at RuntimeExceptions thrown from ten layers beneath the API! The unwarranted pride I’ve felt correctly guessing a working sequence of method calls!
Fortunately, I have found a partial relief in JadClipse, a Java decompiler for Eclipse. JadClipse not only does a reasonable job of recovering source, it also attempts to match up the line numbers in the generated code with the line numbers in the .class file so I can trace execution in the debugger. JadClipse is much happy-making.
A few notes: