Nimbus color differences between JDK versions

[Robert Krüger]

Hi,

we are in the process of migrating an application from Apple JDK 6 to
OpenJDK 8, which is going pretty well thanks to the progress that's
been made in recent months by the Oracle team (thanks for that). Now
we discovered that for the time being we will have to deploy with a
bundled Oracle JRE 7 (currently testing v. 1.7.0_51). When we started
our application with that runtime, we encountered significant problems
with UI colors (see attached screen shots comparing a tree in the
three mentioned runtimes). Now, the color difference between Apple JDK
and Open JDK is not the main problem but the one with Oracle JRE 7
certainly is because in Nimbus (which we use with some color
modifications), the color changes don't seem to be consistent leading
to the effect that you see in the tree example. Before I put lots of
"if (jdkVersion == X) modify colors ..." in our code and adjust this
by trial and error, is this known and is there a better approach for
solving this systematically?

Here are the screenshots as links (if they don't make it through as
attachments):

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33388463/colors-jdk6-s.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33388463/colors-jdk7-s.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33388463/colors-jdk8-s.png

Thanks,

Robert