<Swing Dev> customizing L&Fs in JDK9

[Alan Snyder]

If my understanding is correct, the classes for several JDK specific L&Fs (Aqua, GTK, and Windows) will become inaccessible to applications in JDK9. Is this true?

I am concerned about the impact of this change for the Aqua look and feel, which historically has lagged behind the platform UI and continues to do so (although progress has been made) and for which both small and large customizations have been written. Blocking access to the Aqua look and feel classes will make such customizations much more difficult, possibly even impossible if native code is involved.

While I understand the desire to protect applications from depending upon JDK specific code, the benefit of this restriction seems small. After all, how many JDK implementations are there for desktop applications on OS X? The current OS X application architecture bundles a JRE in each application, so JDK changes will not break installed applications.