Java Decompiling and Eclipse

One of the more frustrating issues are when you debug code in eclipse and want to debug a third party jar but do not have the source.

If the jar is open source and you are using maven you can try to use

mvn install –DdownloadSources=true.

This does not always work, since not all jar’s supply the source files.

In addition there are third part jar’s or sun jar’s that do not have source files. For this we have decompile utilities. The most famous one is jad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAD_(JAva_Decompiler)).

So just go to your eclipse market and write jad. Once you have installed the plugin, next time you need to look at the code you will see: