In this post I will present how you can format and send automatic emails with Spring and Velocity. Spring offers alone the capability to create simple text emails, which is fine for simple cases, but in typical enterprise application you wouldn’t want to do that for a number of reasons:
- creating HTML-based email content in Java code is tedious and error prone
- there is no clear separation between display logic and business logic
- changing the display structure of the email requires writing Java code, recompiling, redeploying etc
Typically the approach taken to address these issues is to use a template library such as FreeMarker or Velocity to define the display structure of email content. For Podcastpedia I chose Velocity, which is a free open source Java-based templating engine from Apache. In the end my only coding task will be to create the data that is to be rendered in the email template and sending the email.