UI-delegate architecture for complex components

Question

Hello,
I've got a question regarding how to architect a new complex component (similar to a color-chooser for example) to be very reusable and configurable with respect to the Swing architecture:
When implementing such a reusable and configurable component (like a color-chooser for example) should I implement an UI-delegate fitting into Swing's MVC way, or should I implement the view on my own architecture following more general MVC.
The component I am about to develop is a composition of other controls (like a color-chooser is compound of a tabbed-pane, a few buttons, a few panels, and a few sliders). So does implementing a UI-delegate with such a coarse-graind component make sense? I seem (or at least hope) to have understood what a UI-delegate is intended for when dealing with atomic controls (like buttons, labels, comboboxes, etc.), but does a UI-delegate make sense when dealing with larger aggregated components?
For instance, when setting a custom UI-delegate implementation for a JColorChooser (overwritten from javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicColorChooserUI), the "paint"-method gets called but seems to be useless, since overwriting it does not produce any effect on how the color-chooser is presented (as I expected, since the JColorChooser is made out of other controls and therefore does not implement its own painting directly). So am I missing some important point here, or is the UI-delegate thing not really intended for compound components made of other smaller ones, and therefore - for the compound components - just a retrofitted implementation to make all Swing components alike?
So my question is about architecture of a larger component than for what I believe a UI-delegate was intended for. But though I would like to be as close to Swing's way of doing it as possible... So if it would be cleaner to fit my component into the UI-delegate way of doing it, how - for example - do I register a default UI-delegate implementation with the current L&F? And what happens if a user switches to another L&F that does not implement (neither directly nor through inheritance) my component's UI-delegate?
Please correct me if I am missing some point here or heading into the completely wrong direction!
Steve

Answer 1

Hi,
it seems you are talking about javabean.