I was unfortunately forced to result to uploading a WAR file as my backup for a web application I am working on.
Luckily I have the most recent WAR file available. I am using Eclipse IDE and am using the Web Tools plugin for all the J2EE work that I am doing with the Dynamic Web Application Project.
When I imported my WAR file, and ran it on a local server, everything works fine. The problem I a ran into is that in the Java Resources/src folder that all my packages and .java files were now only consists of all the same packages, but they are empty.
I checked to see if I could find the files and I found the .class files in an "Imported files" folder that is not accessible in the Eclipse Project Explorer. I believe that I need to do some type of build or something so that my .java files are available for me, but unfortunately this is one area where I lack.
One thing I would also like to know is, one way or the other, am I able to obtain the .java source code files if I have access to the .class files?
Also, I would like to configure this environment as it was before where my Java Resources:src folder contaiend the packages and .java files.
One thing I would also like to know is, one way or the other, am I able to obtain the .java source code files if I have access to the .class files?
The short answer is No. There is no way to regenerate original source files from bytecode files.
If you were really, really desperate you could try to use a Java bytecode decompiler on your bytecode files, but the result will be be nothing like your original source code.
All comments and javadocs will be gone.
All original code layout will be gone.
Original local variable and parameter names may be gone, depending on your original compiler switches.
Constant expressions may have been pre-evaluated, and loops, string concatenations and other constructs may have been transformed unrecognizably.
Depending on the maturity of the decompiler, the Java code might not be semantically equivalent to the original code, and might not even be compilable.
I hope you haven't spent too long developing this application because the best answer may be to start again.
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it's been a while since i've been working with java and especially with eclipse. My professor sent me a huge folder with many subfolders and subsubfolders, that mainly contain .class java files. Now I'm supposed to work on these files, but i just can't seem to figure out how to get all of them working. I found a few solutions for single class files, but i have a whole folder hirarchy here that i want to work on.
I hope you can help me - I read something about decompiling? How does that work?
Note that I have around 50 different files here that need to be accessible.
Thank you very much!
I suppose the class you are attending is not something like "CS 902 - Reverse Engineering", because if that was the case, you would know what to do with the .class files.
So, one of the following holds true:
Your professor has made a mistake, and instead of sending you the java files, he/she sent you the class files instead.
Your professor sent you the entire project, which contains both .java and .class files, and for some reason you have only managed to find the .class files, while the .java files are there, and you just haven't found them. Unfortunately, the convention in the java world is to store .class files in a subfolder under the project root, so if you copy the project folder, you are copying .class files together with everything else.
Your assignment is to write new code which makes use of classes and interfaces supplied by your professor, but your professor does not want you to have the source code of those files. In this case, you can still work with the .class files, because the public definitions contained therein are parseable by Eclipse and usable in your project, without any reverse engineering. So, what you need to do is to find a way to tell eclipse that these .class files form a "Class Library" which is supposed to be used by your project, and then go ahead and develop new .java files making use of the library. I don't remember how this is done in Eclipse, but you should be able to find it out by yourself, or look it up, or perhaps someone else might post a how-to answer. However, at this point we do not even know whether this is in fact what you need to do.
You can use a java decompiler like JD-GUI, you can find it at http://jd.benow.ca/ . This is a very handy tool to have when you want to view a decompiled version of your jar. There are plugins available for eclipse and intellij as well.
Our organization invested in a java web application that we want to be able to develop upon. Unfortunately last developer left with only the .war file. How can we recover some of the class files, change them then redeploy as war again. We tried to do that in Eclipse but after importing as war, we could not configure build path. (which in my understanding, the war was imported as static project). I could not find "Convert to dynamic project" as said in eclipse help document.
A .jar/.war file is compressed using the ZIP format. You can decompress it using any zip utility like WinZIP/WinRAR/etc. and then use your favorite decompiler on the .class files.
Java Decompiler is the best I've ever come across. You could open your entire war with this.
There is another option for special cases: Have a look at aspectj, so you can
weave in additional code around method calls to fix bugs etc.
add fields or methods etc.
It works on the byte code level (it works with .class files).
As for the long run, grab what you recover using a decompiler, and start to replace class files step by step.
We have an java application in which the user can write/execute their own java code and use imports from compiled jars - i.e. they write it, and it is compiled and run by the application. They can also save this code (along with various other information that they are using) - currently this is saved to a human-readable xml file.
I want to be able to use those save xml files in an IDE (principally, Intellij), so that if the user changes things in their compiled jar in the IDE, these changes can also be picked up in the save xml file.
For example, if a save file used a class from the compiled jar, it may have the following import:
import com.company.project.package.subpackage.MyClass;
Let's say that class was moved, so the import was:
import com.company.project.package.subpackage.subsub.MyClass;
...this would change all the save xml files that used that class and import - just as the IDE would for all the other usages in the compiled project.
(This, and other examples, arises because the compiled jar is both constantly in development and in use using the aforementioned application.)
At the moment, if I were to add the save xml files to a sub-project in the IDE, the user can edit the save files manually, possibly taking advantage of 'find/replace' or 'search for usage in text' functions. This is better than nothing, but still a rather involved/complicated process. Also, there is no checking that the code in the save files are consistent with the code in the compiled project.
One approach that I am considering is a script or a test class that would unpack the save xml file, writing the java code to java files, and then try and compile (and possibly running/testing) those java files.
A further step would be to write a maven plugin (we use maven for our build cycle) or an ant script (ant still has its uses...) to do this, and possibly make this part of our build process - i.e. you cannot compile the project without ensuring all of the save xml files in its sub-project also compile.
Does this seem like a reasonable approach?
Are there alternative approaches that anyone could suggest?
..saving as a .java file is not the solution I'm looking for.
Save it as a Zip with 1 (or more) XML files as well as any source (in paths according to package) that is required. You could even include other files easily, a manifest, help files etc.
This has a number of advantages:
It allows source & include files to be a different encoding to the XML
It consolidates all the necessary parts of the project into one file, without any 'jumping though hoops' to make one format fit inside another.
It allows different compression levels as appropriate to the data (e.g. text/XML compresses well, whereas a serialized image does not).
How do I clean up stale .class files out of ${workdir} given set of existing .java files in ${srcdir}? By stale I mean .class files that were generated from now removed .java files. I have tried coming up with something using Ant mappers and filesets etc. but I failed. Removing all .class files older than their respective source .java files would be acceptable, too.
I'm pretty sure there's an ant task to kill .classes older than the .java...
Depend sounds close, and may actually do what you want, but this isn't its intended purpose. Given developmentalinsanity's answer however, this may be the only thing that will Actually Work.
The problem is determining whether a class file without an obviously corresponding source file is really stale.
Try this in a single file (A.java)
public class A{}
class B{}
This will result in both A.class and B.class. So, B.class would seem stale because of the missing java file. You'd probably get similar issues with any inner classes.
Safest bet if you want to make sure there's no old class files lying around would be just to delete them all.
As it’s just not possible to detect what’s stale and what’s not, most builds have a clean target (that’s also part of cleanbuild). The clean target, just removes all files from you’re build directory. This directory normally is unversioned (svn:ignore).
Not all files in you’re build will be the result of the compiler, for example .property files, these files can be stored in an alternative directory that will be copies in to the build directory. For example in a web application build you can store those files in /web/WEB-INF/classes and let Ant copy them into the build directory.
I would like to ship my application as a self-contained jar file. The jar file should contain all the class files, as well as two shared libraries. One of these shared libraries is written for the JNI and is essentially an indirection to the other one (which is 100% C).
I have first tried running my jar file without the libraries, but having them accessible through the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. That worked fine.
I then put the JNI library into the jar file. I have read about loading libraries from jar files by copying them first to some temporary directory, and that worked well for me (note that the 100% C library was, I suppose, loaded as before).
Now I want to put both libraries into the jar, but I don't understand how I can make sure that they will both be loaded. Sure I can copy them both to a temporary directory, but when I load the "indirection" one, it always gives me:
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /tmp/.../libindirect.so: /libpure.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I've tried to force the JVM to load the "100% C" library first by explicitely calling System.load(...) on its temporary file, but that didn't work better. I suspect the system is looking for it when resolving the links in libindirect.so but doesn't care about what the JVM loaded.
Can anyone help me on that one?
Thanks
One way would be to spawn another Java process from the first, generating the appropriate invocation script.
The jar is invoked by the user
The libraries are extracted to a temp directory
A (bash) script is written to the temp directory
this sets/exports the necessary environment variables
this launches the second JRE instance
The code makes the script executable
The code invokes the script
I know, spawning two JRE instances to launch one app would not be my first choice either.
If you are using Eclipse IDE, then this answer might help you.
I had same problem in eclipse windows that I couldn't added dependant .class files from the JNI.
After searching for a while I came to know that "Its a known bug inside Eclipse", In order resolve the same, I ported all the code to NetBeans IDE.
Can not add all the classes files from the JNI folder in Eclipse (JAVA, Windows 7)