Colspan and coloring a cell in jtable

[Whilliam]

Hello guys, Im new at java. Ive been googling this for hours but don't have any luck.
In HTML, there's this colspan thing wherein you merge two or more vertical cells. These cells become one. I want to know what's the syntax for that one in java. Also, I want to know how to set the background color of a cell in java. I've been googling for hours and all I saw was coloring columns and rows.

[JamesCherrill]

AFAIK there's no sensible way to merge cells. The only work-around is to use a custom cell renderer and work out what to display in each of the individual cells so it looks like they are combined into one. - not easy or elegant, but possible.

Setting background color for individual cells is also a custom cell renderer thing, bit this time it's fairly straightforward.
http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/components/table.html#renderer