Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during the last three weeks:

• Gregg Bolinger extends the application-wide hotkeys with a lookup dialog, complete with wiring the events for navigating and canceling.
• Roman Kennke summarizes the Caciocavallo project that aimed to create portable GUI backends for OpenJDK graphics stack.
• Santhosh Kumar has an interesting solution for cross-LAF combobox with group separators. The solution involves putting the grouping logic inside the renderer, and one of the commenters wonders whether this logic should be part of the model or of the specific view.
• Piet Blok writes about the JXLayer project and his experiments with multiple layers and sharing UI instances.
• Alexander Potochkin has assumed the role of specification lead for reference implementation of JSR 295 (Swing Application Framework). He shares his thoughts, outlining the proposed changes and soliciting feedback on his blog, and has already submitted a few changes to the project source repository.
• Native font rasterization is one of the major features added to JDK 6u10 on Windows platforms, and has impressed Naiden Gochev that has screenshots of old rasterizer, SWT (native) rasterizer and NetBeans running under the new rasterizer. Too bad that the Windows look-and-feel only uses Segoe UI on the menus…
• Jasper Potts sums up the work he and Richard Bair have been doing on Nimbus look-and-feel. Perhaps the more disappointing part is that the highly-anticipated designer tool announced last September still can’t be made available to the public. The followup post has an example of skinning a slider under Nimbus. If you plan on customizing Nimbus with painters, note that the com.sun.java.swing.Painter interface is only available in JDK 6u10, so you might as well instantiate Nimbus with the fully qualified class name instead of iterating over available LAFs and querying their names.
• On the Synth-related note, Xavier Young has started a series of tutorials on configuring the EaSynth look-and-feel. The first part is on general button customization, and the second part is on arrow buttons, check boxes, radio buttons and toggle buttons.
• Yves Zoundi has announced release 0.0.3 of VFSJFileChooser component that extends the JFileChooser to browse remote file repositories such as FTP, SFTP, WEBDAV and more.
• Andres Almiray writes about Groovy new binding features, their applicability to SwingBuilder and the comparison with JavaFX binding.
• Christophe Le Besnerais continues his explorations on modern interfaces, aiming to recreate the look similar to that of OnWired web site in Swing.
• Michael Bar-Sinai proposes solutions for complex table cell rendering logic in his java.net article. In particular, he has a class-based and rule-based approaches for separating same-column rendering logic into more manageable code.
• Finally, Maxim Zakharenkov has released version 1.3 of SwingExplorer project. New in this release – NetBeans plugin and tracing component addition.