In Java Today, the JavaDesktop Community is highlighting Gizmoball, a nifty pinball game editor app from students Greg Belote, Joshua Wang, and Tiffany Chang at MIT, as the community's latest featured Web Start application. "Gizmoball is a version of pinball, an arcade game in which the object is to keep a ball moving around in the game, without falling off the bottom of the playing area. The player controls a set of flippers that can bat at the ball as it falls." The player creates flippers, balls, pins, and other assorted thingamajigs, and and then wires up actions to keys. Press the "run" button and you'll be entertained for hours.

Microfinance Open Source (Mifos) describes itself as "an exciting open source information system to fight global poverty. Microfinance is a proven technique to help people lift themselves out of poverty. The challenge now is to scale microfinance operations around the world to reach more people and to attract more capital. Mifos will be a high impact solution because it removes several of the barriers to growth of microfinance programs. Volunteer contributors are needed!"

"Separation of concerns is a core principle of Service-Oriented Architectures. Unfortunately, this principle is often lost when it comes to the implementations of SOA services. All too often we see a big implementation class with multiple concerns such as security, transaction management, and logging all mixed in with the business logic." So what's a developer to do? In the ONJava article Separation of Concerns in Web Service Implementations, Tieu Luu advocates using Spring alongside Axis2 to achieve separation at the implementation level, doing so by bridging in a security framework that is separate from the business logic.