Use jsf as template engine on EAR

Question

Thinking about html e-mails for our e-commerce site I thought about reusing jsf and other 3rd party libraries as a template engine to create the e-mails on our application server (Glassfish 3, EAR).

Is it possible to manually run jsf with a local file and initialize the necessary bean to capture the html output to be saved in a String?

Why have a look at other template frameworks if jsf provides much flexibility and could do the job.

Answer 1

I am currently using JSF on glassfish for generating emails inside of a EJB. I based my work on the following blog post:

• https://rogerkeays.com/how-to-create-email-from-jsf-templates

Basically it works when the JSF is rendered in a request that was made from the web.

I currently try to also use JSF in unit tests and scheduled executions but I currently have trouble to start JSF.

The following class is doing the initialization of Faces:

com.sun.faces.config.FacesInitializer

Unfortunately it requires a complete implementation of the Servlet 3.0 implementation. In my cases starting the servlet engine also requires an JMX server.

From my current experience I would recommend to use a template engine with less dependencies e.g.

• Velocity http://velocity.apache.org/
• Freemarker http://freemarker.org/