Sending Email From Your Spring Application

The Spring Framework provides a helpful utility library for sending email that shields the user from the specifics of the underlying mailing system and is responsible for low level resource handling on behalf of the client.

In my last project I have used spring mail functionality to send mail to the user. This is the simplest way so far I have found to send mail from spring application.

Let us also assume that there is a requirement stating that an email message with login information needs to be sent to the user.

Basic MailSender and SimpleMailMessage usage

Sample Controller:

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

import org.springframework.mail.MailException;
import org.springframework.mail.MailSender;
import org.springframework.mail.SimpleMailMessage;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.Controller;

public class ForgotPasswordFormController implements Controller{
private MailSender mailSender;
private SimpleMailMessage simpleMailMessage;

public void setMailSender(MailSender mailSender) {
this.mailSender = mailSender;
}
public void setSimpleMailMessage(SimpleMailMessage simpleMailMessage) {
this.simpleMailMessage = simpleMailMessage;
}

public ModelAndView handleRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception{
ModelAndView forgotPasswordMav = new ModelAndView();
forgotPasswordMav.setViewName(”forgot”);

if(request.getMethod().equalsIgnoreCase(”post”)){

// Do the business calculations…

// Create a thread safe “copy” of the template message and customize it

String email = request.getParameter(”email”);
SimpleMailMessage msg = new SimpleMailMessage(this.simpleMailMessage);
msg.setTo(email);
msg.setText(
“Dear user,”
+ “Your requested login information are following”
+ “Username :” + username
+ “Password :” + password
+ “, thank you for being with us ”
+ “Thanking,”
+ “Customer Care”);
try{
this.mailSender.send(msg);
status = 1;
}
catch(MailException ex) {
// simply log it and go on…
System.err.println(ex.getMessage());
}
}

return forgotPasswordMav;
}

}

Find below the bean definitions for the above code:

<bean name=”/forgotPassword.do” class=”com.mycompany.businessapp.ForgotPasswordFormController”>
<property name=”mailSender” ref=”mailSender”></property>
<property name=”simpleMailMessage” ref=”simpleMailMessage”></property>
</bean>
<bean id=”mailSender” class=”org.springframework.mail.javamail.JavaMailSenderImpl”>
<property name=”host” value=”mail.yourdomain.com”/>
</bean>

<!–
this is a template message that we can pre-load with default state
–>
<bean id=”simpleMailMessage” class=”org.springframework.mail.SimpleMailMessage”>
<property name=”from” value=”youremail@yourdomain.com” />
<property name=”subject” value=”Your Login Information” />
</bean>

To use this you will need the following two jars in your /WEB-INF/lib

mail.jar
activation.jar

To learn more or other ways of sending mail from spring application you can visit the following link:
Click Here

Itegrating DWR (Direct Web Remoting) with Spring

Hi Springers, I have used DWR (Direct Web Remoting) in my last project which was pretty interesting and I want to share the simplest way of using DWR with spring application. Download the latest version of dwr.jar from here. And put it in the /WEB-INF/lib folder. I have used DWR 2.0.5.

Add the following lines in your web.xml

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>dwr-invoker</servlet-name>
  <display-name>DWR Servlet</display-name>
  <servlet-class>
    org.directwebremoting.servlet.DwrServlet
  </servlet-class>
  <init-param>
     <param-name>debug</param-name>
     <param-value>true</param-value>
  </init-param>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>dwr-invoker</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/dwr/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Now create a dwr.xml in the WEB-INF folder alongside web.xml and add the following line in that file.

<!DOCTYPE dwr PUBLIC
    "-//GetAhead Limited//DTD Direct Web Remoting 2.0//EN"
    "http://getahead.org/dwr/dwr20.dtd">

<dwr>
  <allow>
    <create creator="new" javascript="JDate">
      <param name="class" value="java.util.Date"/>
    </create>
    <create creator="new" javascript="Demo">
      <param name="class" value="your.java.Bean"/>
    </create>
  </allow>
</dwr>

To check go to the following URL.

http://localhost:8080/[YOUR-WEBAPP]/dwr/

You should see a page showing you the classes that you’ve selected.

To learn detail about DWR please visit the documentation site of DWR.

Installing Apache Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu (8.04 / 8.10)

Before we install Tomcat you’ll need to make sure that whether we already have installed Java. Let’s assume that we are trying to install Tomcat we’ve already installed java, but if we aren’t sure we can check with the dpkg command like so:

dpkg –get-selections | grep sun-java

This should give we this output if we already installed java:

sun-java6-bin                                   install
sun-java6-jdk                                   install
sun-java6-jre                                   install

If that command has no results, we’ll want to install the latest version with this command:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Installation

Now we’ll download and extract Tomcat from the apache site. We should check to make sure there’s not another version and adjust accordingly.

wget http://apache.host.com/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.14/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.14.tar.gz

tar xvzf apache-tomcat-6.0.14.tar.gz

The best thing to do is move the tomcat folder to a permanent location. I chose /usr/local/tomcat.

sudo mv apache-tomcat-6.0.14 /usr/local/tomcat

Tomcat requires setting the JAVA_HOME variable. The best way to do this is to set it in the .bashrc file.

The better method is editing the .bashrc file and adding the bolded line there. We’ll have to logout of the shell for the change to take effect.

vi ~/.bashrc

Add the following line:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

At this point we can start tomcat by just executing the startup.sh script in the tomcat/bin folder.

Automatic Starting

To make tomcat automatically start when we boot up the computer, we can add a script to make it auto-start and shutdown.

sudo vi /etc/init.d/tomcat

Now paste in the following:

# Tomcat auto-start
#
# description: Auto-starts tomcat
# processname: tomcat
# pidfile: /var/run/tomcat.pid

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

case $1 in
start)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
;;
stop)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
;;
restart)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
;;
esac
exit 0

We’ll need to make the script executable by running the chmod command:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tomcat

The last step is actually linking this script to the startup folders with a symbolic link. Execute these two commands and we should be on our way.

sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc1.d/K99tomcat
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc2.d/S99tomcat

Tomcat should now be fully installed and operational. Cheers!

Thanks