Obfuscation in Java is the process of making the code difficult to understand or reverse-engineer by obscuring its purpose, logic, and structure. It involves renaming classes, methods, and variables with meaningless names, removing comments and unnecessary white spaces, and restructuring the code to make it hard to follow.
The main purpose of obfuscation is to protect the intellectual property of the code, making it more difficult for others to copy, modify or steal it. It is particularly important for commercial software where source code protection is critical to prevent reverse engineering, hacking or piracy.