A few hours ago an interesting changelist has made its way into the JDK 7 Swing branch. It definitely looks like the Nimbus designer will be available as part of JDK 7.

Unfortunately, it does look like this changelist does not contain all the files that are part of Nimbus designer (see below for the walkthrough), but hopefully this will be amended in the following days. In the meanwhile, here is what i’ve been able to do:

• Click on the zip link on the changelist page and extract the contents of the zip file. I’ve saved it in the C:\JTools\jdk7-src folder.
• Create a new Eclipse project. Point to C:\JTools\jdk7-src\jdk-c5cd40f1f596\make\tools\swing-nimbus\classes as source, and add all the jars in C:\JTools\jdk7-src\jdk-c5cd40f1f596\make\tools\swing-nimbus\libs as external jars.

As i said before, it looks like the changelist is not complete, and i haven’t been able to find the main class to run the designer itself. However, you can run the partial generation of Nimbus painters to get the feel of how that phase is working. Here are the steps:

Run the org.jibx.binding.Compile class passing the following two program arguments:

• C:\JTools\jdk7-src\jdk-c5cd40f1f596\make\tools\swing-nimbus\classes\org\jdesktop\swingx\designer\Designer.jibx.xml
  
• C:\JTools\jdk7-src\jdk-c5cd40f1f596\make\tools\swing-nimbus\classes\org\jdesktop\synthdesigner\synthmodel\SynthModel.jibx.xml

Copy the three .template files from C:\JTools\jdk7-src\jdk-c5cd40f1f596\src\share\classes\javax\swing\plaf\nimbus to C:\JTools\jdk7-src\jdk-c5cd40f1f596\make\tools\swing-nimbus\classes\org\jdesktop\synthdesigner\generator\resources

Run the org.jdesktop.synthdesigner.generator.Generator class passing the following arguments:

• -full false
  
• -skinFile C:\JTools\jdk7-src\jdk-c5cd40f1f596\src\share\classes\javax\swing\plaf\nimbus\skin.laf
  
• -srcDir c:\temp\nimbus
  
• -buildDir c:\temp\nimbus
  
• -packagePrefix org.nimbus
  
• -lafName Nimbus

At this point, the c:\temp\nimbus should have the generated painter classes. Note that if you pass the -full true, the generation will fail since some of the template files (such as LookAndFeel.template) are not part of this changelist.