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

• Is there new life for JDIC? It started with a big bang in 2004, pretty much died late 2006 when Mustang was released and now looks like it has received a renewed attention. The announcement on the forum introduces JDICplus project. At this stage it is a Win32-only wrapper around the Internet Explorer. The main page has four WebStartable applications that show IE, map explorer, flash viewer and HTML editor. The functionality looks very similar to the DJ Native Swing project, except the multi-platform support.
• Are you interested to know when Apple is going to release JDK 6.0? You can know the answer to this question, with one small caveat – you can’t tell anyone. Oh, and you have to pass the interviews and sign a few papers… If you are interested to work for Apple’s Java team on AWT, SWT, Swing and other areas, follow this link to read the job description and apply.
• Build 14 of 6u10 closes the bug on bringing SwingSet2 to be a better demo application for Swing. Looks like SwingSet2 will be no longer maintained, and instead will be replaced by two new java.net-hosted projects. The first is SwingSet3 that will show the core Swing features, and the second is Laffy that will act as look-and-feel test bed. Unfortunately, SwingSet3 is still a private project and can not be accessed (unless you have special privileges), and Laffy’s main page is still the template one.
• Robert O’Connor explores the different closures proposals and how they apply to primitive Swing applications. The first entry is on FCM, and the second entry is on BGGA. If you have a UI with one button and one-line action listener, you might even cut down the number of lines in your application :)
• Daniel Leuck proposes a format for packaging multi-resolution icons in Swing applications. This is one of the issues facing UI application running on high-resolution monitors. If you are interested in this subject, please consider coming to a birds-of-feather session that i will be presenting with Mike Swingler (of Apple’s Swing team) at this year’s JavaOne.
• Collin Fagan introduces a few JavaFX-inspired panels that aim to make it easier to work with core Swing layout managers. Why would anyone still want to use the GridBagLayout is a mystery to me.
• Thierry Lefort experiments with multiple popup toolbars that provide functionality similar to that of Office 2007 MiniBar (floatie). This topic has been mentioned in the session that Jensen Harris (lead designer of Office 2007) has presented at this year’s MIX conference (click here for the PowerPoint presentation or visit the site to view the video feed of the session). They eventually decided to have only one floating toolbar that fades out as you move the mouse away from it.
• Christophe Le Besnerais writes about a class that allows showing any Swing component in its own non-taskbar window. It doesn’t really go beyond providing a simple wrapper around the Popup and PopupFactory classes, and the translucency can be easily achieved by always using heavyweight popup windows, as explained in my entry on the translucent windows tricks.