As it stands now, there's one focus manager per
thread group, which means that components that
want to implement their own focus managers without
stepping on anyone else's have to be very careful
about setting and resetting the shared focus
manager.

It seems to me that it would be more elegant (and
easy to implement) to allow focus managers to be
set at the JComponent level.  When a key event
occurred, the deepest component's focus manager,
if any, would get the event.  If the deepest
component didn't have a focus manager, its
containing parent's focus manager would get the
event, and so on.  The thread group's focus
manager would get the event only if no component
had specified a focus manager.  (Most components
would not specify a focus manager, so this branch
would be taken most of the time.)
(Review ID: 29655)
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N/A

We can't make components any fatter by adding fields, but we should investigate whether adding an object property makes sense (since focus changing isn't performance sensitive).
  xxxxx@xxxxx   1998-06-03

With the new merlin focus implementation, you can now define a focus manager on any Container. I believe this is what this rfe is asking for, so I am closing it as a duplicate of the focus enhancemnt bug id (4290675).

  xxxxx@xxxxx   2001-01-11

How about if a JComponent container got a shot a 
FocusGained, then it could swap FocusManager 
before the actual JComponent target (child in 
container) got focus.  To keep things clean, the 
container would have to get a FocusLost before
focus transfer moved outside container.