---

Here are some links I found for James related things,

Most notably I found this site JavaEye I can find a few mentions of James but the content is in Chinese. This really begs the question how can we encourage Chinese, Japanese, and people from other cultures who are not as likely to communicate in English as Americans, Europeans, and people from India, to engage with our projects?
I would love for the people who are writing on JavaEye to make themselves known to the James community, we'd be happy to help spread the word about James, and are always grateful to people who can help us to get in front of a non English speaking audience.

"James is a very solid and reliable piece of software" Thanks Ant, nice of you to say so.

Niall Commiskey wrote EMAIL notifications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g which illustrates nicely what a useful role James can plan in enterprise systems. Even if it is only used to provide a development or test environment for email, James gives java developers standards compliant protocols *and* full control over the message content and routing, you can create testing stubs, reports, and integrations into other systems that will fully expose the output from your system.

And finally this Yet another email client – Apache James Hupa from Sree Balakrishnan, talking about the latest James sub-project Hupa (IMAP-based Webmail written in GWT) If you're interested in Hupa check out the site first but you may want to read this, if there haven't been any releases yet.

---

---

The Apache James team have submitted two proposed student projects for Google Summer of Code 2008, you can read them here.

In brief they are:

1) Develop a VERP Mailet to allow James to write VERP modified return addresses on outbound messages, and an inbound mailet/matcher to identify VERP bounces and invoke configurable "do something" code.

And 2) James' provided mailing list manager is fine for small closed groups, but lacks the functionality of a more robust MLM, the project is to add some all or more of the following features subscriber and message moderation, double opt-in and bounce handling.

Spread the word, James needs Students!

---

---

== UPDATE ==
I've had to withdraw this talk, because it coincided to closely with the New Job. Sorry.

===

My Talk "Apache James - The Complete Email Application Platform" has been accepted for Apachecon US 07 in Atlanta on the 15th of November at 15:00. Be there!

If you didn't see me at Apachecon EU 07 in May you can look forward to a description of the major features and components of the Apache James mail server, with a focus on how the modular architecture can enable extending, customising and embedding of email functionality into systems and products of all kinds with an email related need.
If you want to integrate email with your enterprise systems, or want to add an open source email application server to your J2EE stack this talk is for you.

Since I first gave the talk in Amsterdam in May life and art have converged, the Mailet API has its own sub-project and the componentisation of James' trunk has proceeded along very similar lines to those anticipated by that talk.

I will be presenting the same outline but with some added detail, news of progress and further plans from the James team, so even if you heard me in Amsterdam I'm sure I will have things to say which will interest you.

---

---

Thanks to everyone who helped, we now have a site for the Mailet API.

---

---

We've just finished setting up subversion and the build stuff for the Mailet API sub project of James.

There are still tasks to complete:

1. Fix james-server trunk before the next nightly build
2. Change the server website "mailet" links
3. Create some decent content for the API website
   
4. Get the web-site updated
5. sort the svn commit emails so they go to the right list
6. release the current version from the sub-project.

However its a big step, and one I've been looking forward to since James became a TLP.

---

---

Gave my talk on James yesterday, I'm not sure how it went, I can never tell. However its done now. I could've done with less material, or more time, which isn't such a bad thing.
If it gets accepted for Apachecon US 07 I'll definitely rationalise it a bit.

---

---

Well the Call For Papers for Apachecon US 2007 is now open:

• The Call for Papers is now open for ApacheCon US, to be held November
• 12-16 at the Peachtree Westin, Atlanta. The conference will consist
• of two day of tutorials (November 12-13) and three days of regular
• conference sessions (November 14-16).
• Please log in to the website at http://apachecon.com/html/login.html
• to submit your proposal.

I've submitted the talk on James which I'm giving in Amsterdam on May 2nd.

---

---

Google Summer of Code '07 will soon be accepting applications from students.

If you have an idea for a student to work on as a James SoC project send it to general@james.apache.org or post it on this wiki

If you are a student and want to submit an application to google about James, please discuss it on the general@james.apache.org mailinglist as well.

Not only do we have a lot of knowledge about what James needs (and doesn't need) we also have two years of experience of evaluating the proposals and experience mentoring two former SoC students.

We can help you to polish your application, and introduce you to our project.

James missed out on a SoC '06 student so I want to make sure we do everything we can to get good proposals and have them accepted.

---

---

Loyal followers of my personality cult (current membership:1) will be overwhelmed to learn that I'm interviewed in Feathercast 24 at www.feathercast.org (I don't know how to insert links when I post from my phone. -update: blogger seems to take care of it for me, now I want to know how to add labels.)
I talk about Apache James, why I like it and where I think we're going with it.
Respect to David for making me sound coherent and sensible, even though I talk for 24 minutes (and thats after its been edited) without taking a breath!
If you enjoy listening to me I suggest you listen to some of the others, where he and Rich talk to actual smart people. :-)

---

---

In the past the Mailet API has been managed within the Apache James Server project. You could always get the api separately but it was managed in the James Server lifecycle.

Today the votes were counted and the API will soon be taking its rightful place as a James subproject.

We'll start small, by releasing the current version, and move on to look at the enhancements we've been discussing over on mailet-api@james.apache.org.

Eventually I hope we'll add things like a Reference implementation independent of James Server and suitable for embedding, an SDK, and possibly a TCK.

If you want to get involved subscribe to mailet-api@james.apache.org and speak up.

---

---

Well I did it at last, got my hands wet with annotations.

Work being work we're still well stuck in the j2sdk1.4 era because of the stuff we don't have the balls to upgrade too quickly :-)

James being James we tend to stick like glue to the oldest JDK we can until we have a justification for requiring an upgrade, as opposed to just a half-arsed reason for it, which is what we usually manage.

So yesterday, after a few weeks of debate on the mailet-api@james list about how we would deal with satisfying mailets' dependance on arbitrary services, I had a go with annotations.

We'd originally toyed with the idea of the service location pattern using JNDI. I built a POC for that out of the Apache Directory naming stuff, which is pretty comprehensively top-notch in both the "it works" and "its easy" categories. But that really seemed to be a cop-out since James has long espoused IoC. So the feeling on the list which incidentally includes some non-james people interested in the API, was that dependance injection should be specified where possible in the API, and Annotations used to let the container know what the Mailet is expecting.

Working on a sandbox fork of James, which I'm doing so I can get away with this stuff *and* let other people see it before I accidentally delete it, I created a custom annotation type and annotated a mutator ("setter").
The idea being that, in this case, the annotation would contain a String name parameter of a pre-configured datasource (javax.sql.Datasource) and on finding the annotation James' mailet loader would lookup the service (in this case in the JNDI context as it happens) and inject it into the mailet by calling the annotated method.
Although I did it with DataSource's which aren't quite the same as Services will be, it was relatively easy to programme James to sort this stuff out, and extremely nice and easy to annotate the method.

Whats more, and this is the big selling point for me, it worked first time.
I know it counts for nothing but it output this reassuring message to the console...

ToRepository Mailet requires datasource maildb
maildb is org.apache.james.util.dbcp.JdbcDataSource@652552
mailet got datasource :-) org.apache.james.util.dbcp.JdbcDataSource@652552

So now, having proven it, I guess I have to get to grips with the niceties of Annotations and design the annotations we want to use.

---

---

I just stumbled on this blog entry by Aaron Johnson from last Summer which demonstrates quite nicely a lot of the Big Good Thing (flexibility and plug-in architecture) about James and the Mailet API and VERP

---

---

Flushed with the sucess of my first ApacheCon presentation in Dublin last year, Happy New Year by the way, which the Dublin audience [pictured below] liked everything about apart from my competence (I'll practice for next time I promise!) which was below average but NOT "poor"!, I just proposed two James related papers for ApacheCon EU 07 , one on James as an application server and the other on the Mailet API as distinct from James.

Hopefully at least one of them will be accepted, IMO it is high time the James community started to make up for the woeful lack of James related activities outside of the project itself.
So if you're involved in the review of the submissions I'm shamelessly asking you to give James its 15 minutes (well 2 x 60 minutes in fact) in the spotlight this year...

---

---

TSS carried this thread about James 2.3.0
Some people have commented about the Mailet API.
I'm currently working on a fork of James (in the James server/sandbox) just for the purpose of examining some proposed Mailet API changes, anyone who's interested in this API should subscribe to mailet-api@james.apache.org and join the debate.

---

---

The James team have release v2.3.0 here

---