Java Disassembler (JDA) is a fork of Bytecode Viewer (BCV) that adds advanced code analysis features. The basic principles of BCV are maintained; however, many aspects are different.
The main reason JDA was forked was that BCV was becoming too large and cumbersome, with many redundant, unused, or useless features. The issue with removing them is that there could be many BCV users that relied on such features. Because of this, it is more appropriate to fork JDA as a separate project. Additionally, BCV's development has stagnated, and the last official build is from July 2015. It has since grown increasingly difficult and arcane to compile BCV from source, and full jars often range into 20Mb in size. It has become necessary to fork BCV in order to make large-scale changes.
In addition to the growing power and complexity of commercial obfuscation programs for Java, it has become increasingly necessary to develop improved reverse engineering and static analysis tools. For this reason, JDA has been developed in order to provide professional-quality static analysis tools for JVM-based languages.
With that in mind, JDA's goal is to be a light-weight yet powerful Java static disassembler. BCV suffered from a multitude of issues, but a large one was that it tried to be a dynamic reverse engineering tool (debugger) as well as a static tool (disassembler) at the same time, only succeeding partially in the latter. JDA's role is to provide a platform and interface for the core features such as analysis and disassembly. Additionally, many useless or irrelevant features have been removed. JDA's scope as a program currently is to be a platform for reverse engineering tools to be built on top of.
In the future, JDA will have powerful static analysis tools, such as control and data flow analysis, code contraction (copy and constant propagation), whole binary cross referencing (xrefs), and an IR engine. However, these standard core utilities will be distributed separately as a plugin.
- Logo (icosahedron) image by Brayden Gregerson, used with permission
- Bytecode Viewer by Konloch
- Disassembler by Bibl