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

• James Britt has an article on IBM.com developerWorks site on developing JRuby Swing applications with Monkeybars library.
• Jean Francois Poilpret continues tackling the more intricate problems with layout managers. This week he analyzes the real-time resizing of different components, including sliders, tables and scroll panes.
• Mikael Grev promises imminent availability of WebStart version of his media player. Currently hehas no plans to open-source the implementation, but the reasoning (no need for outside help) seems a little peculiar. I have repeatedly found over the past years that even if i am the sole developer on the project, it is the user feedback that is driving the project forward.
• David Benson has announced the initial beta release of JGraph X Swing diagramming library.
• Following the announcements on the Griffon project, Andres Almiray has updated the JideBuilder and GraphicsBuilder projects. JideBuilder 2.0 and GraphicsBuilder 0.6.1 are now under Griffon umbrella.
• Ken Orr writes about image-based method to create non-rectangular active (clickable) areas for Swing buttons. While this technique has its merits (splitting the work between the designers and developers is one such example), the needs of modern UIs render it somewhat obsolete. Such aspects as support for High DPI mode, skinning and animations require more advanced solutions.
• And finally, while not strictly Swing related, this might be of an interest to the readers. PulpCore is a new 2D rendering and animation framework for the Java applets available at Google Code repository under BSD license. Milpa is an example of PulpCore-based applet game, and it has all the characteristics of a browser-oriented game. It loads fast, has a lot of animations and is very responsive.