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

• Luan O’Carroll writes about updates to the rollup bar component from the XUI framework. The functionality of the component seems to lie somewhere between the task pane container / collapsible panels of SwingX and the collapsed panels of docking frameworks. The links to the demo videos seem to be down, and it would be interesting to see a WebStart demo and learn how well the component integrates with core and third-party look-and-feels.
• Andres Almiray continues his work on the GraphicsBuilder for Groovy. This week he talks about advanced strokes (based on the code by Jerry Huxtable) and the wide variety of geometrical shapes.
• John Zukowski provides a simple overview of placing custom components on tabbed panes (available starting from JDK 6.0). Unfortunately, all the tutorials i have seen on the subject deal exclusively with putting close buttons on tabs. I would be very interested to hear about at least one another valid scenario for using custom components on tabs. If there is none – why this functionality hasn’t been restricted to, well, putting only close buttons?
• Angelo De Caro writes about release 1.4.0 of MyDoggy docking framework.
• software4java company announced availability of the adaptive menu component. The functionality of adaptive menus introduced in the Microsoft Office 2000 to Swing application has a few significant shortcomings addressed at length in this posting by the lead designer of Office 2007, Jensen Harris. While it is still available in Office 2007, it is turned off by default – if you’re thinking about including this functionality in your applications, you might want to reconsider it.
• Christopher Deckers makes quite an unexpected announcement on library that brings integration with an impressive collection of native components to Swing applications. Based on SWT (with the applying restrictions of target platforms and bundled native libraries), it already provides solutions for embedding web browser, Flash player and multi media player, as well as querying the native file associations and launching registered applications (which looks very much like the Desktop class introduced in JDK 6.0).