A clean technique or library to generating emails in Java

Question

Currently our application generates emails for clients via classic "string smashing" mixed in with some String.replace calls.

Does somebody have a suggestion for an easy/elegant/robust way to generate emails? We are not asking for the fanciest stuff in the world. Our application uses GWT/Guice so we do not have any jsps/struts pages.

Answer 1

You can do this with Velocity or Freemarker . There is an example for doing this using Spring and Velocity . Although I haven't tried this on Guice, I would assume that the example would carry over, for Spring performs the injection of the velocity engine.

Answer 2

java.util.MessageFormat.

Alternatively, and much more powerfully, keep your template as XML with tags for the parameters you want to substitute; use XSLT to do the substitution, and XPath to extract just the text from the XML document after processing.