Chapter 26. Look and Feel
In Chapter 1, we introduced the concept of Swing’s Pluggable L&F ( PLAF) architecture. In this chapter, we’ll get into a variety of topics related to PLAF. The chapter includes:
A discussion of the default L&F presented to users on different platforms, and the trade-offs involved in changing it for your application
An overview of how the Swing component classes work together with the UI-delegate classes
A detailed explanation of the various PLAF-related classes in the
javax.swing
package, as well as some of the important classes and interfaces fromjavax.swing.plaf
An explanation of how PLAF fits into JFC’s accessibility framework using
MultiLookAndFeel
.Detailed discussions of strategies for customizing the L&F of your applications using the following techniques:
Modification of specific component properties
Modification of resource defaults
Use of themes in the Metal L&F
Use of customized client properties in the Metal L&F
Replacement of specific UI delegates
Creation of a new L&F from scratch
This chapter contains a lot of technical detail. You can do a lot with Swing’s PLAF architecture without understanding everything we cover here. If you’re interested in customizing the L&F of your applications, but don’t mind if there are a few things that don’t quite make sense, you can skim the next few sections and jump right into Section 26.6. If you want to understand exactly how everything works, read on.
Get Java Swing, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.