jcomponents

Swing components : vertical text question

If I have a button like the one in this image : http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?4cd775814c.png how could I make the text display itself vertically ? As in j B u t t o n 1 I would like to know how to do the same thing for JLabel . I'm sure there has to be a better way than to create as many labels as there are characters ...

How could I allow only unique strings in a JList ?

I have a JList that holds a bunch of strings . I would like it to act like a Set , so that it will only hold unique values . Is there any way to achieve this without checking that a new string doesn't already exist there ? ...

JSplitPane splitting 50% precisely.

In Swing, what's the best way to make the JSplitPane to split two jpanels with 50% size each. It looks like if I don't set preferred sizes on the panels it always makes the first panel almost invisible (2%) and the second one (98%) Thanks in advance ...

Moving and resizing JPanels object inside JFrame.

Continuing my quest of learning Java by doing a simple game, i stumbled upon a little issue. My gameboard extends JPanel as well as each piece of the board. Now, this presents some problems: Cant set size of each piece, therefore, each piece JPanel ocupy the whole JFrame, concealing the rest of the pieces and the background (gameboard)...