There is No Such Thing as Proprietary Client-side JavaScript

Re:There is No Such Thing as Proprietary Client-side JavaScript by bad_user on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @06:29PM (#3401878)

One thing I do in my daily job for the current project is to automate form submissions on various websites. I deal with obfuscated Javascript all the time.

It's really not a problem. It's also quite amusing when I see "protections" in place, like my local Yellow Pages that encrypts phone numbers that get decrypted when shown by a local Javascript routine, done of course to prevent crawling.

Obfuscated code is not readable. However a smarter view-source can take care of that - imagine a view-source that worked like an IDE. It could beautify the source-code (I'm sure you can already find plugins for this) and once you figure out what a variable / method does, you can then automatically refactor the code, renaming that variable/method.

It takes a bit of engineering, but obfuscated Javascript is still high-level enough to be useful.

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Re:There is No Such Thing as Proprietary Client-side JavaScript by packet on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @09:19PM (#3402278)

This makes it no different from most programming languages. De-obfuscated code still takes a ton of work when you've lost all variable names, comments, and formatting.

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Re:There is No Such Thing as Proprietary Client-side JavaScript by bad_user on Thursday December 29, 2011 @10:26AM (#3403890)

Except most client-side applications are distributed in binary form. Grokking obfuscated assembly language is an order of magnitude harder than doing the same thing with Javascript.

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