For a hovering-mechanism, i need to know if the mouse is currently over a component, even if this mouse is currently over a containing component (with also has interaction, so hitTest is no option).
Does anybody has an idea how to quickly solve that? (without modification of the child components)
No, just pass true as the second parameter to addMouseListener, that will automatically recieve events from all nested components. Then just check the mouse position relative to the parent to see if the mouse is still inside or not.