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

• Richard Kennard has announced release 0.43 of his Metawidget project. Geertjan Wielenga picks this up on the DZone, and Dieter Krachtus has engaged in an architectural discussion on the project. Richard also shows how Metawidget can emit JIDE components.
• Jan Erik Paulsen vents his frustration with some of the Swing pain points, including layout managers, audio / video support and JavaFX design tools vision. Over the past year Jan Erik had a number of very interesting projects, including Capture, Photoshop Express and Amanda, and it looks like the topics above have hindered the progress of these projects to some degree.
• Eugene Toporov announces release 1.0 of commercial JxBrowser library for embedding Mozilla Firefox browser into AWT / Swing applications.
• Ingo Maier announces release 0.1 of scala.swing, an event based library for building Swing applications in Scala.
• Jacek Furmankiewicz continues his explorations of Java builders for Swing layouts, and it looks like this approach strikes a chord with his readers (see followup by Andres Almiray).
• Continuing the trend of Swing as a “UI virtual machine” for JVM-based dynamic languages, Greg Trasuk experiments with project JyMatisse that allows using Jython as the backend for Matisse-generated forms.
• And finally, Christophe Le Besnerais has published a Swing component for cropping images. The ability to install a custom filter (illustrated by grayscaling and blurring the outside of the cropped area) is especially impressive, and my only concern is using JLayeredPane as a base class. Perhaps using JPanel with OverlayLayout can be a simpler solution?