Java Enterprise Best Practices

Use Dynamic Content Strategies

To get the most out of the power and flexibility of Java and JavaMail when building email-based applications, use dynamic content strategies to reduce coding, increase flexibility, and improve user response.

Many JavaMail applications use email as a publishing medium. Most major web sites, whether magazines, newspaper sites, developer communities, weblogs, or retail, provide some degree of email capability. Some of this information is broadcast: newsletter subscriptions, update announcements, and so forth. Other messages are related to transactions: subscription confirmations, order status announcements, receipts, reports, etc. By reaching from the web site into the user’s mailbox, well designed, useful messaging support can make existing applications more valuable by increasing the likelihood that they’ll actually be used.

JavaMail can be used to send one message to a large number of recipients, but given the other tools available, it really isn’t a particularly efficient mechanism for sending spam. Instead, JavaMail (and Java) are ideally suited to dynamically building extremely rich messages targeted at particular users of an application.

Let’s look at some examples on the public Internet and the private intranet. Every morning, the New York Times sends me several emails. One of them is a headlines summary, which includes a number of sections that I’ve indicated interest in. When I registered on the NYT web site, I was able to specify that I wanted ...