I’ve been working on migrating some batch jobs for Podcastpedia.org to Spring Batch. Before, these jobs were developed in my own kind of way, and I thought it was high time to use a more “standardized” approach. Because I had never used Spring with java configuration before, I thought this were a good opportunity to learn about it, by configuring the Spring Batch jobs in java. And since I am all into trying new things with Spring, why not also throw Spring Boot into the boat…

If you’ve updated your Apache HTTP Client code to use the newest library (at the time of this writing it is version 4.3.5 for the httpclient and version 4.3.2 for httpcore) from the version 4.2.x you’ll notice that some classes, like org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient or org.apache.http.params.HttpParams have become deprecated. Well, I’ve been there, so in this post I’ll present how to get rid of the warnings by using the new classes.

If you find yourself getting the following errror, when trying to send an email in Java:

com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPSendFailedException: 550 Access denied – Invalid HELO name (See RFC2821 4.1.1.1)

Failed message 1: com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPSendFailedException: 550 Access denied - Invalid HELO name (See RFC2821 4.1.1.1)

	at org.springframework.mail.javamail.JavaMailSenderImpl.doSend(JavaMailSenderImpl.java:448)
	at org.springframework.mail.javamail.JavaMailSenderImpl.send(JavaMailSenderImpl.java:346)
	at org.springframework.mail.javamail.JavaMailSenderImpl.send(JavaMailSenderImpl.java:363)
	at org.springframework.mail.javamail.JavaMailSenderImpl.send(JavaMailSenderImpl.java:351)
	at org.podcastpedia.batch.jobs.addpodcast.service.EmailNotificationServiceImpl.sendPodcastAdditionConfirmation(EmailNotificationServiceImpl.java:53)
	at org.podcastpedia.batch.jobs.addpodcast.SuggestedPodcastItemWriter.write(SuggestedPodcastItemWriter.java:50)
	at org.springframework.batch.core.step.item.SimpleChunkProcessor.writeItems(SimpleChunkProcessor.java:175)
	at org.springframework.batch.core.step.item.SimpleChunkProcessor.doWrite(SimpleChunkProcessor.java:151)
	at org.springframework.batch.core.step.item.FaultTolerantChunkProcessor$3.doWithRetry(FaultTolerantChunkProcessor.java:329)
	at org.springframework.retry.support.RetryTemplate.doExecute(RetryTemplate.java:263)
	... 43 more

and cannot figure out why does it not work?!, EVEN THOUGH you can send emails via Telnet using the same configuration as the one set up for the Java client or you set the mail.smtp.localhost property to the  fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the client host – that might be IP address of the client host –  as suggested in the JavaMail API FAQ… THEN it might be that you are using an old version of the java mail api.

This is a first post in a series of short code snippets that will present the configuration of Spring beans from XML to Java.

XML:

<bean id="velocityEngine" class="org.springframework.ui.velocity.VelocityEngineFactoryBean">
  <property name="velocityProperties">
	 <value>
	  resource.loader=class
	  class.resource.loader.class=org.apache.velocity.runtime.resource.loader.ClasspathResourceLoader
	 </value>
  </property>
</bean>

Java:

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.