Look And Feel

Abeille Forms Designer has support for multiple look and feels. It supports operating system specific look and feels such as Windows and Mac OS X. Additionally, Abeille provides the JGoodies Look And Feel.

Also keep in mind that Abeille does not store any look and feel information in the forms themselves. When you load a form in your own application, the form will assume the current look and feel of your application. It is up to the application to set the look and feel. It is trivial to set the look and feel during application startup. For example, to set your look and feel to Windows (this only works on Windows operating systems), make the following call before showing any windows:


   try 
{
UIManager.setLookAndFeel( "com.sun.java.swing.plaf.windows.WindowsLookAndFeel" );
}
catch (Exception e)
{ }

Registering New Look and Feels

You can register new look and feels for the designer by editing (or creating) the swing.properties file. This file is located in the lib directory of the Java release. The following swing.properties file registers two new look and feels (Abeille will automatically include these when restarted):


swing.installedlafs = liquid,kunststoff
swing.installedlaf.liquid.name = Liquid
swing.installedlaf.liquid.class = com.birosoft.liquid.LiquidLookAndFeel
swing.installedlaf.kunststoff.name = Kunststoff
swing.installedlaf.kunststoff.class = com.incors.plaf.kunststoff.KunststoffLookAndFeel

Any installed look and feels must be included in the classpath of Abeille.

You can get more information on working with look and feels from the Java tutorial

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/misc/plaf.html