Synth Look and Feel

Synth

Company type	Software component
Industry	Software development, User interface design
Founded	2004 (2004)
Founder	Sun Microsystems
Products	Java look and feel
Parent	Sun Microsystems

synth represents a skinnable Java look and feel that is defined through an external XML configuration file.

Sun Microsystems designed synth with several objectives in mind:

• Allowing customized appearances without programming.
• Enabling visual configuration based on images.
• Tailoring component styling through property-based rules.
• Centralizing style overrides across all UI components.
• Supporting custom rendering using images or user-defined painters.

History

Synth was first released as part of J2SE 5.0 (refer to Java version history).

Starting with Java SE 6 Update 10, Nimbus was added—a cross-platform Look and Feel implemented using Synth technology. Despite this, Metal remains the default Swing look and feel to maintain compatibility with earlier versions.

Architecture

Synth transfers all painting responsibilities to components without requiring custom code (refer to ).

It does not include a built-in default appearance; components absent from the synth XML configuration remain unstyled. Nevertheless, a global default style can be specified, with particular styles applied to selected components.

Example

The following XML snippet defines a style called textfield specifically for text fields. The defaultStyle sets font attributes along with foreground and background colors for other interface elements:

<syntaxhighlight lang="xml">
<synth>
 <style id="defaultStyle">
   
   <state>
     <color value="WHITE" type="BACKGROUND"/>
     <color value="BLACK" type="FOREGROUND"/>
   </state>
 </style>
 <bind style="defaultStyle" type="region" key=".*"/>
 <style id="textfield">
   <state>
     <color value="yellow" type="BACKGROUND"/>
   </state>
   <imagePainter method="textFieldBorder" path="textfieldborder.png"
                 sourceInsets="5 6 6 7" paintCenter="false"/>
   <insets top="5" left="6" bottom="6" right="7"/>
 </style>
 <bind style="textfield" type="region" key="TextField"/>
</synth>
</syntaxhighlight>

If this XML content is saved as synthExample.xml, the following Java snippet demonstrates loading it and applying synth as the active look and feel using the class:

<syntaxhighlight lang="java">

SynthLookAndFeel laf = new SynthLookAndFeel(); laf.load(new File("synthExample.xml").toURI().toURL()); UIManager.setLookAndFeel(laf); </syntaxhighlight>

See also

• Swing, the primary cross-platform widget toolkit utilized in Java
• Pluggable look and feel

External links

• API reference documentation
• synth configuration file format
• tutorial on synth
• guide to synth
• official Nimbus project page