Originally Posted by scmad.gayanb.com/j2me-glossary1.php

Obfuscation, in general, describes a practice that is used to intentionally make something more difficult to understand.

In a programming context, it means to make code harder to understand or read, generally for privacy or security purposes. A tool called an obfuscator is sometimes used to convert a straight-forward program into one that works the same way but is much harder to understand.

C, C++ and Perl are among the languages usually considered to lend themselves to obfuscation. Java byte code is easy to decompile and thus vulnerable to reverse engineering. The code is often obfuscated to protect it from such an attack. Deobfuscation techniques, such as program slicing, are sometimes employed to reverse engineer obfuscation.