Question

I’m looking for a free JavaScript obfuscator. Would compression be enough? What tools would you recommend? Of course, I don’t need military-style obfuscation, I need a simple way to prevent kiddies from stealing my javascript by looking at the source or by using something simple such as unescape().

Thanks, Tom

Answer 1

Your problem is that no matter how much you compress it or hide it, eventually the browser has to interpret it. The best you can do is renaming all variables to meaningless random vars, and removing all comments and whitespace.

A few good tools:

• http://www.dev411.com/dojo/javascript_compressor/
• http://javascriptcompressor.com/Default.aspx
• http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/