As Dalibor’s blog reminded me1, the Nimbus Swing look and feel hit the OpenJDK repositories yesterday. We’ve been waiting on the JDK 6 Update changes to trickle through for some time, so it was great to see this huge lump of code land on us. The downside? It looks like someone accidentally dumped a lump of their build environment in there too, so we’ll have to wait some time until Nimbus is properly in OpenJDK.

But why would anyone want this you ask? Well, I wondered a little myself so I hacked up a little Swing code and found out (after remembering how to write it in the first place — so don’t blame me if it sucks). Here’s the app using Metal (the default on Fedora 10):

App running with Metal L&F

And now here’s it on Nimbus:

Nimbus L&F

The difference should be plain to see. This is running as a patch on OpenJDK6 built from hg with bug 100036 and bug 100037 (Nimbus) applied.

$ /builder/builds/jdk6/build/linux-amd64/bin/java -version
openjdk version "1.6.0-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0-internal-andrew_08_apr_2009_18_50-b00)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.0-b17, mixed mode)

Hopefully, things will be sorted out in good time for this to appear in Fedora 12! :)

1 - Why blog yourself when a third party will undoubtedly do it better?