Code Obfuscation

[namon22]

My PM is asking for Code Obfuscation to stop reverse engineering.

If I obfuscate my code then class names would be changed and I would have to re write my spring applicationcontext file. Is there any support or easy ideas to achieve that ?

Thanks,

[Chris Beams]

It sounds like you're currently using XML to configure your application, but you've posted in the right place - the Spring JavaConfig project is a perfect solution for those that need obfuscation. Essentially, you'll drop using XML and start writing your configurations in pure java.

Before:

<beans>
    <bean id="foo" class="com.myco.Foo"/>
</beans>

and you would access that bean as follows:

ApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("beans.xml");
Foo foo = (Foo) ctx.getBean("foo");

In this situation, you're quite right - obfuscation would render the beans.xml file inaccurate and the configuration would not work.

Here's the same configuration using JavaConfig:

@Configuration
public class AppConfig {
    public @Bean Foo foo() {
        return new Foo();
    }
}

And bootstrapping goes as follows:

JavaConfigApplicationContext ctx = new JavaConfigApplicationContext(Foo.class);
Foo foo = ctx.getBean(Foo.class);

As you can see, with JavaConfig it's 100% Java - no XML, no string identifiers, so everything will obfuscate together and work perfectly.

Hope this gives you what you're looking for!