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Visual feedback in a card game with Java Swing

I'm working on a card game and I'm stuck on how to proceed with giving a simple visual feedback when the players are interacting with the cards that are placed on board.
As you can see in the image I'd like to implement drawing arrows between the cards that interact with different object on the board (for example when the player attacks with a starship a arrow will appear between the ship and its target). When the player commits his move, the arrow needs to be drawn on the opponents gui aswell when the opponent starts his defending phase.
The whole client gui aswell as the cards are coded with swing library and are JPanels with various layouts. The cards is one class and the board gui is composed of several gui classes (handGui, heroGui, unitFieldGui etc) added together in a mainWindow gui class.
I don't really know how to proceed to achieve this kind of visual feedback and would appreciate if you could point me in the right direction, what kind of technique would help me solve this problem?

Check out the section from the Swing tutorial on Glass Panes. a Glass Pane is a component that is painted over top of the frame and you can do custom painting.
You can use the SwingUtilities.convertPoint(...) method to convert the two card components location relative to the Glass Pane. Then you do your custom painting to draw the arrow from one component to the other.

Advise on Java GUI Component Layout strategy

I am hoping someone can offer a strategy for the following Java GUI:
I am implementing a Scrabble-like algorithm and I would like to write a GUI where a user can compete with the algorithm. My experience with GUIs is limited and I am trying to avoid a big learning curve if someone can suggest a useful subset of components upon which I can focus.
I would like to display two playing areas side by side. Each playing area contains a board and a tile holder. Tiles from the holder can be dragged and dropped onto the board.
Obviously, the basic component is the tile, which is just a square displaying a letter. The tile holder and the board are both tile containers (grids of different sizes). The playing areas each hold the two tile containers and allow dragging and dropping from one container to the other.
The layout of the two playing areas is: the board on top, the tile holder on the bottom, and some neutral space between them.
The layout for the window is just to display the two playing areas side by side.
Perhaps naively, it seems to me I don't need much. But finding the right pieces is proving to be quite a task.
Any advice is appreciated.

Top level JPanel with a GridLayout, 1 row, 2 columns, will create for you a panel with two evenly split areas. After that you can add another JPanel for each side (just sequentially add them), and these two JPanels can have a BorderLayout. For these two BorderLayout JPanels, you can add to each the following:
A JPanel with a FlowLayout of ImageIcons that hold a pictures of a scrabble tile, and this JPanel will be added to the south position on the BorderLayout JPanel.
Another JPanel with a custom class you'll make called ScrabbleBoard extends JComponent. Here you can extend paintComponent and draw the board how you wish, probably making use of obtaining the width and height so you can draw a board that scales to how much space you have available for the component. This custom JComponent will be added to the center position of the BorderLayout JPanel.
A component added to the center position of a BorderLayout tries to be greedy and takes up as much room as possible, while components on the sides do not, so it's often a good choice for UI's that require a small navigation or menu control area, and a larger area to view what is considered the main graphics.

Java2D using buttons and Graphics2D

I want to create a tile editor sort of program where I have a viewport for rendering on the left side of the program, and then a panel of buttons on the right to use for opening files, saving the tiles etc... I was going to use LWJGL to do this, but it seems theres no good way to do it.
Essentially I guess I'm asking, how do I have a viewport for rendering using g.DrawImage or something, and then also have a panel of buttons next to that viewport?

You can do this using jME3 as they support rendering in a canvas on a Swing window. There is even a tutorial on doing it in the tutorials section of the website.
You can also do it using a fully rendered window and then putting the buttons inside the scene. I'm surprised LWJGL doesn't support this though as jME3 is built on top of LWJGL.

Select an image from JPanel

I am working on a small project which requires me to load images into a window and then move them around at will.
Thus far I can load images onto a JPanel simply by using a graphics object to draw them to the JPanel.
Now I'm faced with the challenge of figuring out how to differentiate between the various images I've loaded when I click on them so I can drag them around the screen.
Any ideas?

If you use a JLabel for each image, and make the JLabels subcomponents of the JPanel, it'll automatically draw the image, and you can add MouseListeners to each of them to be able to drag them around the screen.

Use the Component Mover to drag any component around the screen.

painting on glassPane is slow

I'm building a domino game in java and I am using modified rectangle2d's to draw my tiles. To drag a tile I use mouse events to change the tiles coordinates and redraw the JPanel.
This all works great and very smooth, until I start using the frames glassPane, I use the glassPane to be able to drag a tile from one JPanel to another.
It works, but rendering is quite slow when I paint on the glassPane. I've tried to use clipping when repainting, but it makes no difference.
Does anyone have an idea?
thnx.

It seems when a glassPane is visible on your RootPaneContainer, all repaint events behind the GlassPane have their clip set to fill the entire RootPaneContainer. This may be overriding your manually specified clip rect.