Jode
Why did I wrote it?
Someday I found guavad, a disassembler for java byte
code (it does similar things like javap -c). I used
it on a class file, and found that it was possible to reconstruct the
original java code. First I did it by hand on some small routines,
but I soon realized that it was a rather stupid task, and that I could
write a perl script
that does the same. At the end of the next day I had a working
decompiler.
Now while it was working, it was not easy to use. You had to
decompile the code first with a disassembler, cut the method, you
wanted to decompile and then run the perl script on it. So I decided
to get some information of the class files and do this all
automatically. I decided to write it in java now,
because it suited best.
Just for the records: the java code is now more than 50 times bigger than the original perl script and is still growing.