A huge number of PropertyEditors has been created and you could help the usage of these through adding a SingleValueConverter that utilizes a PropertyEditor. A Simple version that we've used is like this:

import java.beans.PropertyEditor;
import com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.SingleValueConverter;

public class PropertyEditorValueConverter implements SingleValueConverter {
    final private PropertyEditor editor;
    final private Class type;

    public PropertyEditorValueConverter(PropertyEditor editor, Class type) {
        this.editor = editor;
        this.type = type;
    }

    public Object fromString(String str) {
        editor.setAsText(str);
        return editor.getValue();
    }

    public String toString(Object obj) {
        editor.setValue(obj);
        return editor.getAsText();
    }

    public boolean canConvert(Class type) {
        return this.type.isAssignableFrom(type);
    }
}


Here's a test case:
import java.awt.Color;
import junit.framework.TestCase;
import sun.beans.editors.ColorEditor;

public class PropertyEditorValueConverterTest extends TestCase {
    PropertyEditorValueConverter converter = new PropertyEditorValueConverter(new ColorEditor(), Color.class);

    public void testMatchesClass() throws Exception {
        assertTrue(converter.canConvert(Color.class));
        assertFalse(converter.canConvert(Object.class));
    }

    public void testConverting() throws Exception {
        assertConvertWorks(Color.black);
        assertConvertWorks(Color.blue);
        assertConvertWorks(Color.yellow);
    }

    private void assertConvertWorks(Color testObject) {
        String string = converter.toString(testObject);
        assertEquals(testObject, converter.fromString(string));
    }
}