So it has been a while since I blogged about Nimbus, Java One has come and gone and I am sure you are all wondering whats happening to it. Well things have changed for Nimbus since it was announced at Desktop Matters conference in March. The initial plan was for Nimbus to be a open source project jointly run by Ben Galbraith and myself. In early prototype I hacked together thats available from nimbus.dev.java.net was very well accepted both inside Sun and in the swing community. As a result a decision was made to bring the Nimbus L&F into the JDK as part of the new Consumer JRE. What this means for is it will be available as part of the JDK 6 sometime early 2008. If you would like to read more about the Consumer JRE then read here.

Nimbus Coming Soon

I think this is amazing news for Nimbus L&F as it will hugely strengthen its adoptance. I am now working full time on getting Nimbus done with the tight deadlines to get it to you for early next year. The final version should be complete around August at which point I will try and get it released back to the open source project. Hopefully then we can get a good chunk of testing done on many different applications so we have a great version for the JDK. Ben has said that he will help with the effort to take it at that point and do a backport to run on JDK 5.

Here is my personal list of objectives for Nimbus L&F:

  • Create as high fidelity implementation of the SPEC as possible within the technical constraints.
  • Aim for 100% Java2D painted vector graphics, so no images other than icons. This is a ambitious aim as it is a lot more work than a image based L&F but will give us huge flexibility in the long run with things like high DPI monitors and resolution independence.
  • Be based on Synth so that there is finally a fully realized L&F from Sun for Synth that can be used to help other people create new Synth L&Fs.
  • Be as true feel wise to the native platform as possible within the tight deadlines. By this I mean using the native key combinations like Command C on Mac and Ctrl C on Windows for copy. Also to try and have the File Chooser for have a layout and functionalty as the native L&F one but with Nimbus skin.
  • Provide API or hooks so the Nimbus painting code can be used to aid skinning custom swing components.

These are what I would like to achieve with the Nimbus L&F, how much I can manage within the tight deadlines we will have to see. If features don’t get in then hopefully we can add them to the open source project and later back into the JDK. Animation is on the would really like to get it in pile but there as a lot to do before I get there.

I am very interested to hear any feedback you have on Nimbus, like feature X is crucial to my company using Nimbus or feature Y is not important to me. I will do my best to accommodate any good suggestions into Nimbus.