Day 20. Implementing JavaMail in EJB Applications

JavaMail is one of the common services of the J2EE architecture that is responsible for reading, composing, and sending e-mail messages from enterprise applications. JavaMail enables you to implement a Mail User Agent (MUA), similar to the familiar Microsoft Outlook, Pine, and Eudora. Today you'll explore the benefits and features that the JavaMail API offers, and how you can use them in a simple EJB: the Emailer EJB. First, you'll be exposed to the main concepts (classes and interfaces) of the JavaMail API. JavaMail basically provides a set of classes that model a mail system. The API provides a platform-and protocol-independent framework to build Java-technology-based mail and messaging applications. At the end of the day, you'll apply this to some of the scenarios we use in our university registration system. JavaMail is implemented as a Java platform optional package and is also available as part of the J2EE.

Today you'll explore the JavaMail API and use it to develop a sample full J2EE application that includes components in the EJB tier, Web tier, and client tier.

Throughout today's activities, you'll learn

• What JavaMail is, and the different protocols it can handle

• What the JavaMail API is, and the concepts it implements

• How to compose, send, and read e-mail messages with different scenarios (forward; reply; nontext messages; multilingual messages; messages with attachments) that are similar to a real e-mail system

• How to develop and deploy a full portable J2EE enterprise application based on the MVC pattern to demonstrate the use of the JavaMail API

• How to deploy the J2EE application on both the WebLogic Server and the JBoss server environments, and configure each server's environment to run the portable application