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

• Laird Nelson dives into intricacies of keyboard shortcuts, actions maps and focus state inheritance to show you how to make all dialogs and frames to be disposed on pressing the ESC key. Hopefully this will be one of many entries in this series, and the Bricks project will live long and prosper :)
• Angry Mongoose laments the lack of Swing best practices. It is indeed the unfortunate reality that Swing developers live in. The wealth of well-compiled, updated and comprehensive information available to the consumers of alternative desktop technologies (such as WPF or Flex / Flash / Apollo) is astounding, compared to what is produced by training / marketing / evangelizing departments behind Swing (if any).
• Chiral Software brings the power of of JBoss, JSF, iText and JFreeChart together, showing how to create PDFs with rendered Swing components. The first part lays the groundwork, and the second part shows how to create vector-based charts.
• Sergey Malenkov is working on enhancements to the core JColorChooser component, and is asking for the community to step up and weigh in on the design. Unfortunately, the actual designers do not read programmers’ blogs, so this is most probably a lost call. Hopefully, there are some professional designers working on the JavaFX design tool. If it’s designed by the programmers, the end result will not move the designers away from the competing tools.
• Tim Dalton continues his explorations with Scala, using Swing as the “native” UI toolkit. This time, he takes a look at the newly announced Scene Graph library. While the first example shows just a few shapes and a translucent button, the second one is a little more interesting. Building on his previous example, he shows a rotatable calculator. It would be extremely interesting to know whether the rotated Swing controls continue responding correctly to the mouse events, something that Alex has had quite a few problems with.
• Andres Almiray continues beefing up the Groovy bindings for Swing, adding more capabilities to the GraphicsBuilder (here, here and here), and showing a nice example of the Linux penguin mascot done in Groovy.