How to get the Groovy generated java source code

Question

We have some legacy code with Groovy, and we want to remove Groovy from the application, so, we need to get the java source code generated after using the gmaven plug-in.

Basically, in other words I am dynamically generating new classes (using gmaven Groovy maven plug in) and I would like to be able to obtain the java source code of such generated classes.

I researched a little bit and can see that the only goals for this plug in are

<goal>generateStubs</goal>
<goal>compile</goal>
<goal>generateTestStubs</goal>
<goal>testCompile</goal>

I can't see any goal that allows you to obtain the fully implemented java source code, the stub code is not enough for us as we need the final implementation source code in order to get rid of Groovy.

Answer 1

I'm not very familiar with the gmaven plugin, but I assume it compiles the groovy code into byte code. In this case, you can use a byte code decompiler, there is a nice list here. In the past I've used JAD and it was quite nice. The best ones will also try to create meaningful variable names based on class names.

One warning though - Groovy objects are derived from GObject, not java.lang.Object, so you would probably need to keep the groovy jar until the groovy->java porting is done. Also, be prepared that it won't be a very easy to read java...