The “Break it Down” Blog

I saw this post by Daniel Spiewak that is a great summary of what is going on with Nimbus LNF as well as the fact that the LNF is based on the new “painter” functionality introduced by the SwingX project.

For those not in-the-know about Nimbus, it’s the new Look and Feel that will be part of (the default?) in Java 7, but should be introduced earlier as part of the Consumer JRE work.

Some things that are pretty amazing about this new LNF is that the entire LNF was drawn using a new Adobe-Illustrator-esque tool that is internal to Sun right at the moment. The way the tool works, according to the author or Nimbus, is you draw the Java 2D effects you want, and those designs are compiled to Java2D painter-based code.

For those curious about painters in general, Romain Guy put together a demo on how to use the painters to chain the look of a JXPanel. You can also check out the painter Javadoc and take a look at how it works… from what I see, they are basically pluggable rendering algorithms, e.g. “render using a checkerboard pattern”.