Suggestions for Java email templating? [closed]

Answer 1

It is also possible to create a "mail content jsp" like

mails/orderConfirmed.jsp
mails/sendingYourOrderNotification.jsp

then simply do an http client request "/mails/*.jsp" to obtain the mail content you want.

I think it's a fair use of jsp since you want to generate HTML anyway, and requesting your own server is not bandwidth consuming.

The good thing is that you can do jsp inclusion, or even use more advanced libraries like tiles, jsf, struts, wicket. You don't need to learn a new tool for that, you can use what you already know. Jsps are a quite performant templating engine, they exists since the years 2000.

The bad point is that you can't use your typed variables to compose your jsp, you're limited to strings as request parameters (or a good huge json :-))

It is also a good way to isolate code and even to split servers later if you need performance optimization.

Answer 2

I ran into a similar problem about a year ago. In our case, our front end developers were all familiar with JSP, and I really did not want to throw another templating engine into the mix. I wanted something that relied on the servlet container's JSP processor to generate e-mail content for me.

It's fairly straightforward:

1. I had to have a JSP page in my application (you can put it in /WEB-INF if you don't want it externally accessible).
2. I wrote a custom HttpServletResponse and ServletOutputStream that captures content written by the servlet container and turns it into a String, and relied on RequestDispatcher.include(...) to make a "request" to the template JSP (I also wrote a custom HttpServletRequest to isolate the original request from mutation).
3. Because this is a bit of a hack, and not the way the servlet API was intended to be used, I encapsulated all this in a utility class, so that all the client code has to do is pass in the path to the JSP template, and get back the processed content.

Answer 3

StringTemplate is also a very nice template engine.