Two weeks ago, David Qiao announced that the JIDE Common Layer would have support for overlays, following a mix of the techniques presented by Kirill. I'm happy to say that JideBuilder includes support for Overlayable components as well, there are five basic components so far: OverlayCheckBox, OverlayComboBox, OverlayRadioButton, OverlayTextArea and OverlayTextField (jide-oss-2.1.3.02). Other Jidebuilder nodes support Overlayables as well, through a 'overlayable' property, those are: autoCompletion, comboBoxSearchable and textComponentSearchable. The version changed to 1.0a4 and eventually will make it into 1.0 when Groovy reaches 1.1 (hopefully by October).

By the way, JIDE JCL is hosted @ Java.net, one of the perks of being hosted there is that each project has access to a centralized Maven repo, the latest jide-oss version is available from it, just configure the following repository in your pom and you're in business
<repository> <id>maven2-repository.dev.java.net</id> <name>Java.net Repository for Maven</name> <url>http://download.java.net/maven/2/</url> <layout>default</layout> </repository>
Keep on Groovying!