glows in blender: are they possible?

i’ve been thinking that it would be nice to use glows for lights in blender, and i am wondering if it is possible to get a straight glow without using GIMP or a post-production renderer for it. And I don’t mean a bloom glow, instead I mean like one coming from a light. This effect is used in Maya, where all the User has to do is increase the ‘Incandescence’ amount and they’ll get this nice, soft glow that illuminates other objects.

Is this possible? Or, on another thought, would it be plausible to write a CG shader and port it to Blender to get the same result? Thank you in advance!

You can fake it with particles.

With the new Jahka particles you can probably make particles come out of all directions and set them to be destroyed when they hit an object.

Do you mean like these from Doom 3?

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/533/doom3lightsst8.jpg

If he means those lights he can render a copy of the light meshes in a seperate render layer then blur and combine that layer into the render in the compositor, preferrably setting the mix mode to add or screen.