Show Me The Source, Jode-y!

I've been using the Jode Eclipse Plugin probably as long as it's been out. It's one of the few Eclipse plugins I always re-install. The plugin will decompile any .class files that Eclipse comes across.

This turns out to be pretty handy. When you are debugging and you accidentally step into a 3rd party library, you can actually see the source code (but you may not get debugging information if they didn't compile it into their classes). If you are looking at 3rd party library that has no documentation and isn't OSS, you can decompile the class files to see what they're doing with what you pass in and what they should return.

Is it legal? Probably not. Will the 3rd party support you if you rely on a call that they don't publish? No way. Will you get your work done faster and feel ultra-cool? Yes... yes you will.