Recovering the source

[Nathan Klatt]

I don't have much hope for this but is there any way to recover something reasonably approaching the original source of a GWT project given the generated class, html, JavaScript, etc files?

A client has given us the generated web application but does not have access to the original source and the original developers are unavailable. (Yes, this makes me nervous and, no, I don't know the full circumstances, but I'm not the one calling the shots here.)

If we can get it to a working state, we will probably continue pressing on with it as a GWT application. Otherwise, we will write it from scratch which means back to the PHP dungeon for me.

I have played around with decompiling the class files but I suspect a significant chunk of the client code remains hiding in the JavaScript, is that correct? How difficult will that be to replicate?

Can anyone offer some hope here?

[Jim Douglas]

Without the original source, this will be a rewrite. At best, GWT-
generated JavaScript is helpful for debugging IFF it was generated
with output style detailed or pretty. Even in this scenario, it's not
practical to attempt to reverse-engineer the original Java source.
And there's almost no chance that's what you have; it's almost
certainly generated with output style obfuscated, which makes it
completely indecipherable.

[Chris Conroy]

If you have the symbol manifest you could recover a decent amount of information. Though, the only hooks for that are for deobfuscating individual stack traces on the server.

If I understand your situation correctly, it's as if someone handed you a compiled object file with debugging symbols stripped, and now they are asking you to write new code on top of that. If you have the symbol manifest, then it's closer to an unstripped object file.

The short answer: unless you can get access to the original source, a rewrite is probably in order. 

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[Nathan Klatt]

Thanks for the responses. Rather a bummer but not unexpected.

Maybe I can talk them into rebuilding with GWT because we do have most of the back-end logic available in the decompiled class files.