Look and Feel Resources

Question

Anyone know a good site that explains how to start writing you own Look and Feel? Been searching for a while and I can't seem to find one.

Answer 1

I'm rather sure you will start a discussion about the pro's and con's here. My position is: It depends.
A static initializer is called, when the class is loaded, and it is difficult to control, in what order classes are loaded. A static method is called when you do it explicitely. So the static method has the great advantage, that you can control the time and sequence.
However, a programmer could forget to call a static method. The initializer however is guaranteed to be called. So from this point of view, it is an arguemt for the static initializer.
Some of your examples are also candidates for lazy initialization: Do it automatically on first use, e.g.
static Trace trace = null; // some trace object, initialized with null
public static synchronized Trace getTrace() {
    if (trace == null)
        trace = new Trace();
    return trace;
}