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

• Dusan Pavlika writes about a Master’s thesis by Jan Taus on skinning Swing components. The PDF file of the thesis provides a very detailed overview of how look-and-feels work – this is definitely a good introduction for the aspiring LAF writers.
• Christopher Deckers announces release 0.92 of the native components for Swing (web browser, media player, flash viewer). This release features improved Flash player and includes support for Linux platforms.
• Simon Morris shares his views on making Swing the best platform for the desktop development in the next few years. It brings together quite a few interesting ideas, including my number one wish for 2008 (full cross-platform video support) and echoing my lament on the amount of branding that Sun puts in the Java platform. His final vision of Java embedding native controls and native controls embedding Java components invokes the work that Christopher does on his DJ project (from the previous bullet).
• Chet Haase shares more demoes from the Scene Graph project. This entry shows an iPhone-like interface (don’t you just love blurry icons with pixelated outlines? :) ), and this entry shows a few very basic demo applications. Hopefully, by the time the project is released, the demoes will match the level of sophistication found on professional Flash websites.
• Andres Almiray writes a complete step-by-step introduction tutorial to the GraphicsBuilder. While you wouldn’t find anything that can’t be done in pure Java2D, the compactness and readability of the Groovy code is very impressive. Groovy-based look-and-feel anyone?
• Dalton Filho writes a detailed tutorial for Swing developers that wish to learn the wxWidgets UI toolkit. This might be a nice addition to the UFacekit project that was mentioned last week.
• Eric Burke posts a call to action on providing a full-fledged Java counterpart of Excel spreadsheet component. Along the way, he argues that the JTable is not a good fit as a base class for such a component, and he has quite a few good points. I’m quite skeptic that somebody would be able not only to start such a project, but also to follow through on all the complexities and functionality that is provided by the latest Excel :(
• Tim Dalton updates on the bridge between Swing and Scala, posting information on the Google Code-hosted code repository for his SQUIB project.
• Two new project releases using the JIDE component suite. Designer Vista is a UI design tool that allows quick UI prototyping in a Visio-like interface. MyMoney is a financial software tool for working with online banking services.
• The Synthetica look-and-feel is used in the new release of MyUniPortal project. See the screenshots here.