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

• Clemens Eisserer continues working on the XRender pipeline for Java2D, and has a few screenshots showing the progress of this project. Part 1, part 2 and part 3 show different test applications under this pipeline.
• A message from Richard Bair on the mailing list of AppFramework (reference implementation of JSR 296) announces that Alex Potochkin has taken over the ownership of this project. The time indeed has arrived – the last source commit was in October 2007, and while Alex hasn’t posted any message on the mailing list / his blog, i would assume that he is taking his time making himself familiar with the project itself and the JCP / JSR process in general.
• Alex himself continues writing about the JXLayer project and talks about the internal painting implementation in his latest entry. Jing Ge has a follow up entry in which he builds a complete validation module using BeansBinding, JXLayer and Hibernate Validator.
• Xavier Young has a short introduction for using the EaSynth look-and-feel.
• Ethan Nicholas introduces the JavaCSS project that aims to provide CSS support for styling Swing and JavaFX components. While the amount of comments on this entry indicates a significant level of interest in this project, it would be interesting to see how well will it be able to cope with the expectations implied by using the “CSS” in its name. As mentioned by Ben Galbraith in his JavaOne 2006 session, Swing and HTML are sufficiently different in that you can not take the existing “pure” CSS directives and apply them on Swing components. In addition, implementing the layout constructs of CSS may require changing the existing application layout managers. Throw the look-and-feel layer into the mix (don’t forget that the look-and-feel is responsible for computing the inner metrics of Swing components, such as margings, padding, gaps, etc), and you get quite an interesting challenge.
• Ken Orr writes about unified toolbar buttons in his quest to emulate the appearance of native Mac applications. Surprisingly, this entry features a rather questionable advice on using the SwingUtilities2 class. Not sure about the Apple VM, but this is a strict no-no for even Sun VMs. Not only this class is in an internal sun package, it has also changed location between JDK 5.0 and JDK 6.0. What’s the alternative for SwingUtilities2.drawStringUnderlineCharAt? Call BasicGraphicsUtils.drawStringUnderlineCharAt and install the desktop rendering hints before that.
• This is most probably will be a part of the next weekly JDK 7 build. Bug 6725214 on forward-porting the new D3D rendering pipeline from 6u10 has been marked as Fix delivered. For the brave souls wishing to venture into the implementation details, follow this Mercurial changeset. No word yet on porting the support for shaped and translucent windows and which package that might end up in.
• Jacek Furmankiewicz continues working on the Java SwingBuilder project, and this time he writes about adding an SWT-style API for creating menus.
• And finally, Richard Kennard adds component wiring based on Commons JEXL to his MetaWidget project, aiming at those environments that don’t have expression languages built into the language (such as Swing).