Plugin obfuscation with obfuscate4e

A new version of obfuscate4e is out the door. So let me tell you what it's all about.

Obfuscate4e helps you obfuscating your eclipse-plugins. It integrates ProGuard into the EclipseIDE and provides some functionality to ease the integration into the PDE build process. That means whenever you build your plugin (using plugin export, feature build or product build) it is obfuscated automatically.

There are quite a few reasons to obfuscate your plugins: smaller bundles and faster downloads, removing unused classes, hiding implementation details, ...

Even if you don't develop plugins, obfuscate4e has something to offer: it registers a proguard ant task you can use in your build scripts. But to leverage its full strength, consider converting your java project into a plugin project, even if you don't plan to use it in an OSGi environment.

Obfuscate4e comes currently in version 0.6, so it is not quite rock solid. And some knowledge of the ProGuard syntax is needed. But don't be afraid, it is not that tricky. So check it out, use it, and give us some feedback on how to improve it.