Disclaimer: I am a newbie who is just going through the starter tutorials and searching through the wiki and the forum for things that interest me.
I am trying to decide whether to put a Swing widget panel on the left in the jME environment (eg. with JMEDesktop) or put the jME environment in a canvas in a Swing frame with a widget panel on the left. In each case, I would like interactivity between the widget panel and the jME rendering. I am aware of SceneEditorDemo, RenParticleEditor, HelloJMEDesktop and TestJMEDesktop, and I have looked through many forum posts but have yet to find out a list of pros and cons to each of the two approaches. Especially, I am interested in the performance, speed, load and ease of implementation of each approach. Just from running the .java files above, I have to say I like SceneEditorDemo and RenParticleEditor better.
Please let me hear about your thoughts and any useful resources you may recommend; it will be much appreciated. 
Swing/Awt/swt or whatever with ajme canvas seems far more reliable than the jmedestop over the jme renderer (seems kinda bugged last time I tried)