L&F Defaults
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We have been talking about the defaults settings of java pluggable look and feels and how we could retrieve them using the UIManager and display them in human readable form using a TableCellRender. An applet has been built with that code and you will find it below. You will obviously need to have the java plug in installed for the applet to show up in your browser.
As you can see some of these settings can be changed easily but changing others would be quite a tedious task and those we will leave untouched. The colors and fonts of a given look and feel are defined by instances of the ColorUIResource and FontUIResource classes. Both classes have public constructors and they are descendents of class that we are familiar with (Color and Font) which allows us to create new instances with out any difficulty.
I said changing some of the settings wouldn't be easy, let's try to qualify that; while the class associated with colors and fonts remain the same for different L&Fs, the same cannot be said about other properties such as Input Maps or borders. So we would need to handle each L&F separately, if they were to be customized. Perhaps it would be easier to create your own look and feel instead.
Now to the next step where we will see the modified applet with it's modified look and feel in action