Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

• A three-part series by Eric Burke on do’s and do not’s of scroll panes. Read part 1, part 2 and part 3. A good rule of thumb would be to never use scroll panes for wrapping UI controls. Only use them for wrapping text areas, trees, lists and tables.
• The first public tutorial on using AnimatedTransitions library by Nazmul Idris. Promised at this year’s JavaOne and covered in Filthy Rich Clients, this library is yet to see the light of the day (and hence the tutorial is a little unexpected). I’ve written on the subject of UI transitions before, questioning the usefulness of this technique; it still appears that this field draws a few “that’s interesting” but doesn’t go much farther than that. An interesting paper can be found in the Phosphor research project that puts some hard numbers on transitions usability.
• Want to use Swing look-and-feels in Groovy 1.1 applications? Danno Ferrin shows you how.
• SwingWorker gets some internal facelift in the latest Dolphin binaries, switching the thread pool implementation to the standard java.util.concurrent classes.
• Matt Nathan has a first draft of the tutorial on JXComponent and XComponentUI classes. Combined with Jan Haderka‘s announcement on release 0.9 of SwingX (which coincided with the downtime for swinglabs.org), it shows that there is still some life in SwingX. Unfortunately, it still lacks well-defined release schedule and strong commitment from Sun to the development lifecycle and overall direction of the project.