Using e-mail is an important communication tool in software companies, but performing communications mostly with e-mail is dangerous. In this post, this issue will be detailed together with common e-mail mistakes. This information can be generalized for most types of companies.

• For sending a report, meeting record etc. which is not confidential, to a manager or a group.
• For sending a short message which is not urgent, to a person who can’t be accessed via telephone and face-to-face.

• For confidential messages and criticisms: E-mails can be distributed to other people or large groups easily, so this is not a good idea.
• For situations  which could be used as evidence in a court of law : For example, if you say “We will do X item in a month” to the customer with e-mail, it can be a mandatory item for you in the next days.
• For explaining a complex topic: It will be time consuming to write hundreds of words. Speaking will be more effective.
• For explaining an important, sensitive topic: Word emphasis, voice tone, gestures and mimics are very important for conversations. E-mails have none of them and this may cause misunderstandings.

•  Don’t use e-mail bodies as title, this is ridiculous:

•  Don’t put hundreds of people to your e-mail’s “TO” or “CC” list. Use BCC. Otherwise all people and spam softwares will know all e-mails:

• Don’t use infinite forwards for e-mails. These type of mails are not funny for most people.

• Don’t use e-mails as FTP. Use a file transfer protocol for sending messages larger than a few MB. A common wrong usage:

Introduction
Velocity is a template engine. Using Java classes, you can inject objects into template engine and use those injected objects in velocity template (.vm) files.

•  It can be used in desktop applications, web applications and other areas where a structured text or code is required.
• It can be used as a powerful code generator. Dynamic codes are created by velocity injected objects.
• It can access all public attribute and methods of given object.
•  It has an easy and clear syntax.
• You can define user interfaces (HTML, JSP etc.) dynamically and developers and designers can work seperately. So, MVC pattern can be used too.

Here is an example velocity template file helloWorld.vm:

Hello $param

And below is an example Java file HelloWorld.java that uses the template:

import org.apache.velocity.app.VelocityEngine;

import org.apache.velocity.Template;

import org.apache.velocity.VelocityContext;

import java.io.StringWriter;

public class HelloWorld

{

    public static void main( String[] args ) throws Exception

    {

        /*  first, get and initialize an engine  */

        VelocityEngine engine = new VelocityEngine();

        engine.init();

        Template template = engine.getTemplate( "helloWorld.vm" );

        VelocityContext context = new VelocityContext();

        context.put("param", "World");

        StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();

        template.merge( context, writer );

        System.out.println( writer.toString() );    

    }

}

Console Result: Hello World

In the code Velocity engine is created, initialized, velocity tamplate file template is taken, required parameters are put into context, and at last the string is written to the screen.

Commands

Velocity also has a built-in VTL (Velocity Template Language) syntax that has following statements:

VTL Tags

Escape Tool

Because of the VTL is a template language, string operations are required widely. For that case, some escaping methods are supported for java, javascript, html, xml, sql and some character renderings exist: 

(For more detail http://velocity.apache.org/tools/devel/generic/EscapeTool.html)

For example,
$val = “Stop!”
$esc.java($java) 
produces \”Stop!\”
or
${esc.d} produces $ output.
${esc.h} produces # output.