title: Creating a fancy search bar with Swing components
body: <p>I'm trying to come up with an elegant recreation of the search bar component in <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/Mozilla_thunderbird_3_0_4.png" rel="nofollow">Thunderbird</a>. The clear button doesn't appear until there is text in the box, so that screen-shot is a bit inaccurate.</p>
  
  <p>Should I use a layered pane and get some buttons to float above the box? (but then getting the text to not appear below the buttons would be hacky) </p>
  
  <p>Maybe just put buttons at the ends of the search bar and have it somehow blend in?</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas or maybe a style reconsideration is welcome, thank you.</p>