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<document>
  <properties>
    <title>Home</title>
    <author email="dev@commons.apache.org">Commons Documentation Team</author>
  </properties>
  <body>

    <section name="Commons BCEL">
      <p>
        The Byte Code Engineering Library (Apache Commons BCEL&#x2122;) is intended to give users a
        convenient way to analyze, create, and manipulate (binary)
        Java class files (those ending with .class). Classes are
        represented by objects which contain all the symbolic information
        of the given class: methods, fields and byte code instructions, in
        particular.
      </p>

      <p>
        Such objects can be read from an existing file, be transformed
        by a program (e.g. a class loader at run-time) and written to a file again.
        An even more interesting application is the creation of classes from scratch
        at run-time. The Byte Code Engineering Library (BCEL) may be also useful
        if you want to learn about the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the format of
        Java .class files.
      </p>

      <p>
        BCEL contains a byte code verifier named JustIce, which usually
        gives you much better information about what's wrong with your
        code than the standard JVM message.
      </p>

      <p>
        BCEL is already being used successfully in several projects such
        as compilers, optimizers, obsfuscators, code generators
        and analysis tools. Unfortunately there hasn't been much development
        going on over the past few years. Feel free to help out or you
        might want to have a look into the ASM project at objectweb.
      </p>
    </section>

    <section name="Documentation">
      <p>
        The package descriptions in the <a href="javadocs/api-release/index.html">Javadoc</a> give an overview of the available features
        and various <a href="project-reports.html">project reports</a> are provided.
      </p>
      <p>
        The Javadoc API documents are available online:
      </p>
      <ul>
        <li>The <a href="apidocs/index.html">current stable release</a></li>
      </ul>
      <p>
        The <a href="scm.html">source repository</a> can be
        <a href="https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf?p=commons-bcel.git">browsed</a>, or you can browse/contribute via <a href="https://github.com/apache/commons-bcel">GitHub</a>.
      </p>
    </section>
    <!-- ================================================== -->
    <section name="Release Information">
      <p>The latest stable release of BCEL is here, you may: </p>
      <ul>
        <li><a href="https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-bcel/download_bcel.cgi">Download</a></li>
	    <li>Read the <a href="https://www.apache.org/dist/commons/bcel/RELEASE-NOTES.txt">release notes</a></li>
        <li>Inspect the <a href="bcel5-bcel6-clirr-report.html">extended Clirr report</a> comparing 5.2 with 6.x</li>
      </ul>
      <p>
        Alternatively you can pull it from the central Maven repositories:
        <pre>
&lt;dependency&gt;
    &lt;groupId&gt;org.apache.bcel&lt;/groupId&gt;
    &lt;artifactId&gt;bcel&lt;/artifactId&gt;
    &lt;version&gt;6.5.0&lt;/version&gt;
&lt;/dependency&gt;
        </pre>
      </p>

    </section>
    <!-- ================================================== -->
    <section name="Getting Involved">
      <p>
        The <a href="mail-lists.html">commons developer mailing list</a> is the main channel of communication for contributors. Please remember that the lists are shared between all commons components, so prefix your email by [bcel]. </p>
      <p>You can also visit the #apache-commons IRC channel on irc.freenode.net or peruse <a href="issue-tracking.html">JIRA</a>.</p>
      <p>Alternatively you can go through the <em>Needs Work</em> tags in the <a href="taglist.html">TagList report</a>.</p>
      <p>If you'd like to offer up pull requests via GitHub rather than applying patches to JIRA, we have a <a href="https://github.com/apache/commons-bcel/">GitHub mirror</a>. </p>
    </section>
  </body>
</document>
