Found this today by Fabrizio:
It provides pointers for Java rich client development by someone
who spends part of his time as a Swing developer and is the creator
of blueMarine, an
open source application for digital photo workflows. Lots of
interesting topics covered, including NetBeans Lookup class and the
update functionality that your application can have too for free,
as well as the standard NetBeans objects such as FileObjects,
DataObjects, Nodes, Explorer Views, etc.