See the title. I've tried to change component orientation to RIGHT_TO_LEFT, but that had a unexpected side effect - it behaves strangely with components with specified preferred size.
(JDK 1.6.0_23, Eclipse VE)
EDIT
Here is the example of this:
We have JFrame with jMainScrollPane on it. Inside jMainScrollPane we place a jMainPanel. Now set jMainPanel's preferred size to be narrower than jMainScrollPane's. jMainPanel will still take all the space on jMainScrollPane. Now changejMainScrollPane's orientation to RIGHT_TO_LEFT and see what happen.
Sample code (change jMainScrollPane's orientation to see the difference):
import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.ComponentOrientation;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import javax.swing.BoxLayout;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;