How to make button highlighted or pale in java swing properly?

I'm using Swing with default UI (without any special skins).

How to make some buttons/textfields more bright or more pale? It means the user is expected/not expected(although not completely disab开发者_如何学Pythonled) to press the button.

Example: user had changed a field - "save" button becomes more bright (for example, green). Status is "compilation failed" - "execute" button is pale (although user can still execute previous version of something). User filled in "password" field - he expected to fill in "password confirmation" - so it becomes bright.

• I have: {normal, disabled, invisible}
• I want: {bright, normal, pale, disabled, invisibe}.

How to make it properly, without hacking with drawing things, with separation of content and presentation? I want it to look well even if user overridden colour settings in the system. Should I use some other toolkit?

I expect something like I set hints for the given control, and then skin read hints and applies additional look and feel options (such as brighter background) without me dealing with concrete colours. May be one skin will use other background and some other skin will use other font for this effect. Like in enabled/disabled case, but more flexible.

Just use setBackground() to change the color to match the component's status. Maybe even create a Custom Component that has a method to change the status and it knowns which color matches that status.

I'm not sure that I see the value in what you're trying to achieve from the examples that you've provided. Is it possible that users could get confused about how the application works if you give them functionality that differs from their expected user experience?

If the user hasn't yet changed a field, the save button could be completely disabled. What's the value in being able to save if there have been no changes made. Alternatively, if you still dead set on making this distinction, can you do it in another way? Perhaps a visual queue, an icon next to the field that's changed, cell highlighting, or a * appended to the end of the text on the window name to show that there are unsaved changes in a window, perhaps?

From a purely user experience perspective, I don't think you want to go messing with the way people expect applications to behave unless you have a really good reason!