JSON is a standard format for sharing objects and data within an application. When working in Java, there is no built-in support for JSON processing. There are, however, several widely-used libraries and options to choose from. In this article, we will focus on Jackson, which is one of the most popular.

AutoMapper is an object-to-object mapping system used by many of our customers. It aims to simplify and organize code responsible for sharing instance values from an object of one type to an object of a different type.

Maven is perhaps the most widely-used project management tool for Java. Based on the Project Object Model (POM), it is used not only for compilation of source code, but also dependency management, documentation, running tests, packaging, deployment, and more. We are frequently asked if we have a Maven plugin for running DashO. Though we do not offer a specific Maven plugin, adding DashO to your Maven-based project is surprisingly easy by leveraging Ant.

Customers occasionally ask us about adding DashO, Dotfuscator, or JSDefender to their Docker-based build processes. We do not provide pre-built Docker containers for our products, but it is relatively straightforward to create your own containers with the distributions we do provide. Historically, setting up licensing for these containers could be a challenge, but with the recent addition of Floating license support to DashO, Dotfuscator, and JSDefender, even the licensing part is straightforward.

This blog provides example Dockerfiles for each product, as a starting point for building your own containers. You will need to replace {x.y[.z]} with the appropriate major.minor[.patch] version.

Localization is often a key ingredient when building Xamarin Forms applications with a global audience. There are different ways to approach app localization, but most of these leverage the built-in tools provided by the .NET Framework. These include RESX files to configure localized strings and an auto-generated resource class which provides strongly-typed access to the string translation at runtime. This mechanism has been available since .NET 1.1, and is used for localization of WinForm, WPF, ASP.NET, and Xamarin applications.

The dynamic type in C# provides flexibility that is not available in other statically-typed languages. Since its introduction in C# 4.0 (.NET 4.5), we have worked with customers who wanted to know more about how dynamic types are impacted by the obfuscation process.

Butter Knife is an annotation processing library that helps streamline boilerplate Java code in Android views. At compile time, Butter Knife annotations are processed to generate the relevant UI code to make views function properly.

When obfuscating applications that use Butter Knife, there are specific configuration patterns you should follow. The code that connects generated classes to their views uses runtime reflection under the hood. Because of this, the original name of the View is required.

When configuring DashO we need to:

Entity Framework is an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework used in Xamarin, WPF, ASP.NET and many other types of .NET applications. It greatly simplifies the code that a developer typically needs to write for database access and querying.

Entity Framework pairs the names of database tables to the names of model types in source code that are used to generate the tables. These names must stay consistent for the application to function properly. This means that when performing renaming obfuscation on these sections of code, we must exclude the model types from renaming.