Why is Look and Feel not calling my ButtonUI?

I created a LookAndFeel class that extends the MetalLookAndFeel. The only thing it really overrides is the ButtonUI. It does the following:

Then in the ButtonUI class, I have a "System.out.println" in every method, yet nothing prints out. Any idea what's wrong?

Did you remember to implement a "public static ComponentUI createUI( JComponent c )" method in your class? Check out the JavaDoc on this method... you have to implement it in every ComponentUI subclass for it to get installed correctly.

yes, I have:

Is the problem one of loading? I have the look and feel classes on the classpath - should they be in the extensions (ext) folder?

OK, it's not the loading issue. I put it in the ext folder and it still didn't work. Here's what's weird though:
When I explicitly called jbutton.setUI( ( ButtonUI ) MyButtonUI.createUI( jbutton ) ) it worked! The button took my class, appeared properly and all the system.out's printed! Argh! So why is the LookAndFeel not properly installing it? Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

OK... are you telling the application that you want to use your look and feel?

You can also tell Java to make your look and feel the default... make a swing.properties file in your $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib directory, put the following line in it -

And make sure your classes are on the default classpath (or ext directory).

Thanks for the reply.
Yes, it is definitely installing my look and feel class because it returns the name of my L&F class when I do:

HOWEVER, when I do the following, it returns the metal look and feel class:

What's weird is the look and feel class I have seems to be ok, because the following code installs it for the button:

Any idea what's wrong?

Here's the (really barebones) test code I've made to test stuff out, and it's working...

The ButtonUI class :

package com.mycompany.plaf;
 
import java.awt.Color;
import java.awt.Graphics;
 
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JComponent;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;
import javax.swing.plaf.ComponentUI;
import javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalButtonUI;
  
public class ButtonUI extends MetalButtonUI {
    
    private final static ButtonUI buttonUI = new ButtonUI();
    
    public void paint(Graphics g, JComponent c) {
        System.out.println( "HERE!" );
        JButton b = (JButton)c;
        System.out.println( b.getText() );
        g.setColor( Color.red );
        g.fill3DRect( 0, 0, c.getWidth(), c.getHeight(), !b.getModel().isPressed() );
        g.setColor( c.getForeground() );
        g.drawString( b.getText(), 
                (c.getWidth() - SwingUtilities.computeStringWidth( g.getFontMetrics(), 
                 b.getText() ) ) / 2, 
                 ( c.getHeight() + g.getFontMetrics().getAscent() ) / 2 );
    }
    
    public static ComponentUI createUI(JComponent c)
    {
        return buttonUI;
    }
}

The MyPlaf class :

package com.mycompany.plaf;
 
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;
import javax.swing.UIDefaults;
import javax.swing.UIManager;
import javax.swing.UnsupportedLookAndFeelException;
import javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel;
  
public class MyPlaf extends MetalLookAndFeel {
    protected void initClassDefaults(UIDefaults table) 
    {
        super.initClassDefaults(table);
        table.put( "ButtonUI", "com.mycompany.plaf.ButtonUI" );
    }
    
    public static void main( String[] args ) {
        try {
            UIManager.setLookAndFeel( new MyPlaf() );
        }
        catch (UnsupportedLookAndFeelException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        
        JFrame f = new JFrame();
        JPanel p = new JPanel();
        JButton b = new JButton( "Test" );
        System.out.println( b.getUI().getClass().toString() );
        p.add( b );
        f.getContentPane().add( p );
        f.setDefaultCloseOperation( JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE );
        f.setSize( 300, 300 );
        f.setLocationRelativeTo( null );
        SwingUtilities.updateComponentTreeUI( f );
        f.setVisible( true );
    }
}

[ January 28, 2004: Message edited by: Nathan Pruett ]

Thanks!! It works. The problem was that I wasn't implementing paint(). All the java.sun.com tutorials never mentioned implementing paint(), but if you don't, it won't use your button UI. I had only implemented update() instead of paint (and let it use MetalButtonUI's paint method) and for some reason that kept it from using my UI.