[...]

So why do Sun use obfuscation ?

(I'm thinking of the COM.rsa.* classes in jsse.jar up through 1.4.2.  Though,
to be fair, I think it may actually have been RSA doing the obfuscation[*]).

Obfuscation has it's place, I think.  A small place, to be sure, but it's not
useless (if you don't expect magic from it).

As for the OP's question, I have no real idea which is best.  I doubt whether
JODE is up to much (too old to understand the bytecode sequences generated by
modern versions of javac).

   -- chris

[*] Qualification: I have just noticed that Preemptive claim that Sun used
their DashO Pro product "to obfuscate the encryption libraries as part of the
JDK", so maybe it was Sun's choice after all...

Obfuscation may not be as useful as some people would believe but it's  
certainly not worthless.  Besides the marginal protection it gives to your  
intellecutal property (your intellect, your employer's property), a key  
benefit is the shrinking that can be achieved.  It is not unusual to  
reduce the size of compiled code by up to 50% by running it through an  
obfuscator.  This shrinking is all but essential for J2ME development  
where storage is limited and downloads are often paid for by the  
kilobyte.  While not as critical for JavaSE, it can still reduce the  
download times of applets and web-start applications.

Dan.

That's possible. On the other hand you could be a perfectly good
programmer, and one who understands that obfuscation provides a smaller
resulting bytecode, which is very useful sometimes (e.g. J2ME).