apk-parser VS Byte Buddy

I've forked and updated an old, archived APK-parsing library (here's the original) that I use for one of my spare time apps (here), and made the library public and alive again, here.

2&3. I see. Sadly the Android framework can't parse split APK files. This is why there are some other libraries. Sadly what I consider as the most intuitive, comfortable, and light (apk parser, which I forked here to solve some of its issues) is not being maintained anymore. Do you know of a nice alternative to it?

In that case, why not take some abandoned library and re-publish it, making other people contribute to it? Example is this one which I've forked from here. It's a library to parse APK files without using the Android framework to do so. I used it on my own app (here) as it has advantages over what Android offers. Sadly it's archived and won't be updated anymore.

Currently, Ulyp uses bytebuddy library which does an immense job of handling all the work of instrumentation and makes it extremely easy for all Java developers. The rest is relatively straightforward to implement. The ongoing blogposts will shed a light on how the tool is implemented. Right now, let’s move to action.

byte-buddy - runtime code generation for the Java virtual machine - https://github.com/raphw/byte-buddy

> It is stable and in use by distinguished frameworks and tools such as Mockito, Hibernate , Jackson, Google's Bazel build system and many others. Byte Buddy is also used by a large number of commercial products to great result. It is currently downloaded over 75 million times a year.

As seen above, the API exposes the user to low-level bytecode manipulation via byte arrays. It would be unwieldy to do it directly. Hence, real-life projects rely on bytecode manipulation libraries. ASM has been the traditional library for this, but it seems that Byte Buddy has superseded it. Note that Byte Buddy uses ASM but provides a higher-level abstraction.

Just a drive-by comment: ByteBuddy is worth a look https://bytebuddy.net/. It is built on top of ASM.

> can you show an example of how you'd parse, say, a .java.in

The canonical way to do such a thing is through the java annotation processing api [1] and using a tool like java poet [2]. Before you did that, you'd probably decide if you wanted to instead use bytecode generation with a library like bytebuddy [3]

But, assuming for some reason, you wanted to torture yourself and actually consume a java.in file and apply a regex, then you'd probably pull out the "maven-replacer-plugin" [4] and configure that for the task at hand. (or use your favorite templating language plugin. There's a million of them).

Though, to be fair, this really isn't something that comes up in regular java programming due to the nature of the ecosystem. Anything you'd want to codegen likely already has a library and anything you didn't would receive (legitimate) push back.

[1] https://www.baeldung.com/java-annotation-processing-builder

[2] https://github.com/square/javapoet

[3] https://bytebuddy.net/

[4] https://github.com/beiliubei/maven-replacer-plugin

Have a look at byte buddy.

If you've ever used libraries like https://github.com/JakeWharton/hugo or https://hibernate.org/ (if you've ever done some backend development) and wondered how do they seem to add some code/logic into your app just by adding some annotation to some method, or if you ever wondered how mocking frameworks like Mockito can change a class behavior for example, then most likely you're interested in a programming technique that allows to modify existing code, usually known as Aspect oriented programming (also known in Java as Bytecode instrumentation) which, even though it might sound intimidating at first, some really cool tools such as Byte Buddy or AspectJ make it quite easy to accomplish.