First look at Nimbus and “Java SE 6 Update N”

September 30th, 2007 | 8 Comments »

A mildly unexpected announcement on Jasper’s blog (a little earlier than hinted previously) that leads to this page on JDK 6.0 project unveils the first binary drop of Consumer JRE, or “Java SE 6 Update N” as it will be officially known. While the previous name was very catchy, the new name is very bland and generic (really, you couldn’t go with a letter more sexy than “N”?)

The naming aside, we finally get a chance to play with Nimbus. Surprisingly, the full class name is sun.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel (why not in javax.swing?) There are a few visual glitches, as expected from early access drops. Here is a sample screenshot of an internal frame:

Nimbus first screenshot

As you can see, while the desktop pane has a nice gradient image, other visuals still need to be improved, including the title pane main button, the title pane horizontal line and unselected enabled checkboxes and radiobuttons (they are marked as disabled and do not respond to mouse events).

It’s not clear how the community should report bugs. The feedback section points to the Swing & AWT forum, while the changelist shows that internally created bugs use the ancient and not so trustworthy bug parade.

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8 Comments on “First look at Nimbus and “Java SE 6 Update N””

  1. 1 pavan said at 10:34 pm on September 30th, 2007:

    Krill,
    I hope u r given a chance to contribute and use ur Swing expertise in making Nimbus a great LookNFeel…

  2. 2 Jasper Potts said at 11:10 pm on September 30th, 2007:

    The reason it is not in javax.swing is that would then be new API which can not be added in a update release. I hope that we can move it to javax.swing for Java 7.

  3. 3 Jasper Potts said at 11:13 pm on September 30th, 2007:

    You are welcome to post bugs as comments on my blog and I will file bugs for them if they are new.

  4. 4 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 11:18 pm on September 30th, 2007:

    Jasper,

    Wouldn’t that be very problematic, potentially breaking applications referencing the sun.swing package? Or perhaps the sun.swing will be just an extension of the new (in JDK 7.0) javax.swing one? And i’ve already posted a copule of stack traces on Swing & AWT forum.

    Thanks, Kirill

  5. 5 Richard Bair said at 10:58 am on October 1st, 2007:

    Hey Kirill,

    Unfortunately, the way the JCP works, we don’t have a choice on location. It cannot be in javax.swing until Java 7. But the choice was made to push out Nimbus now. It will be moved to javax.swing.plaf.nimbus in Java 7. We probably will move Nimbus out of swing.swing and put it in com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus for security related reasons (sun.swing is treated differently than com.sun in the Java plugin).

    Fortunately, it isn’t all that bad. UIManager.getInstalledLookAndFeels() will return Nimbus as one of the look and feels. If you just iterate over the list and choose the LAF with the name “Nimbus”, then you’ll get the right one, both now and in Java 7.

    The people who have to worry about the change are going to be 3rd party component authors. We’re working with JIDE now, and will be working with any interested 3rd party component authors to make it as smooth as possible.

    Cheers
    Richard

    Oh. We haven’t seen the bug you are seeing with disabled checkboxes? Can you send me the code to have a look?

  6. 6 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 4:27 pm on October 1st, 2007:

    Richard – my bad. Those are marked as disabled in the code, but the caption texts were not updated. Apologies for a misleading comment, i’ve updated the blog entry.

  7. 7 And the longest JRE class name is... said at 11:56 am on November 7th, 2007:

    [...] i was looking through the folder structure of the latest Mustang Update N, a thought occurred to me to look inside the rt.jar. There are some interesting things there, and [...]

  8. 8 Nimbus is getting a new home said at 10:25 am on December 19th, 2007:

    [...] already mentioned that the upcoming Nimbus look-and-feel is not being hosted in a usual location (javax.swing [...]