The other day I was discussing with colleagues if Nimbus should be the default LAF(Look and Feel) for Swing application. The current default LAF is Ocean which is a spiced up theme for Metal which has been the Swing default LAF since the beginning. It feels like with a large release like Java 7 it is about time we changed the default LAF to a more sensible choice which leaves two choices Nimbus which is the new cross platform LAF and the system native LAF which will be Windows LAF on Windows and GTK LAF on Unix. Apple has already gone with the system native choice and the default LAF for Java Swing applications on Mac is Apple’s Aqua native LAF. The only reason for remaining with Ocean LAF is to maintain backwards compatibility for old Java applications which were written with static pixel based layout so will be all messed up if the size of components changes. My feeling is that sector of users should be getting pretty small now and as long as we provide a easy work around like system property file that lets a user/administrator change the default LAF back to Ocean for those few special cases then we can move forward and select a modern LAF as the default. So then it comes down to what to choose Nimbus or Native(Windows/GTK) I am torn between the two. So we decided the best idea is to ask more people, so what do you think?

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If you have a strong feeling one way or another then please explain in a comment below as we would love to hear. All your votes and comments will be taken into consideration when we make the final discussion.

Update
I have closed this poll and opened 3 new ones on the post Breakdown of what should be default LAF for Java 7. So follow that link if you would like to vote.

The video,slides and demos are now available for the JavaFX Keynote we gave at Devoxx 2008.
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During Devoxx 2008 Richard, Josh, Martin had a interview with the Java Posse. The recording of it is now available online:
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Parleys.com has posted the first of our JavaFX talks from Devoxx 2008. You can watch it here or as a bigger version on Parleys.com. This talk is the 1 hour version covering the JavaFX Language, Scene Graph and Animation presented by Richard Bair and Martin Brehovsky, I bailed on helping present this one as I had been up most of the night working on “Devoxx Themed Swish Demo”. Its well worth watching and should take you from knowing nothing about JavaFX to being able to build a cool little application. Even if you are already using JavaFX you may learn some handy new snippets. This is the one hour version of the talk that I gave the slides and demo for in Introduction to JavaFX Talks – Devoxx 2008 – IJTC 2009.

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Following on from the success of the JavaFX Devoxx animations Stephan Janssen asked if I could do a similar video to replace last years intro video that is played before the start of each of the recorded sessions. I decided this was another chance to see how JavaFX copes with animation. This time I needed a 10-15second clip of PAL video 768×576 25fps. In this blog I will explain how I created this animation and take you though recreating it step by step. I started out creating the graphics in Photoshop based on the ones I had from the Devoxx theme for Swish with all the parts that I am going to need to animate as separate layers. All the layers I want to access from JavaFX are named with the “jfx:” prefix and simple camel case names so they will be exposed to JavaFX code and come though as neat variable names.

Complete Graphics

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