Due to the generosity of Google I got a nice Google wave test account. Now I am looking desperately to some spare time to evaluate the integration of jaev to the wave. One idea is to expand the validation to wave addresses via the wave protocol. Maybe an online validation as wave bot is another exciting idea.

The jaev framework is in productional use at least one installation and no major problems where filed so far. I'm keeping my fingers crossed

I am working already on some new features:

• Caching negative responses of mail servers
  When a mail server refuses communication due to suspected spam, the result will be cached to reduce network traffic.
• Suggest e-mail addresses
  When the validation fails suggest a list e-mail addresses. This algorithm may use the previous request and a default list of domains to compute some suggestions.

If you have any good ideas, file them on the issue tracking system or the google group.

Maybe I am applying for a google wave developer sandbox access to provide a google wave robot for online e-mail suggestion. Bah, that sounds like some work

The second release candidate was built this afternoon. It contains some fixes and some improvements suggested by PMD and Findbugs. Another major focus was to improve the performance of jaev. This was achieved in reducing the number DNS lookups by introducing a cache for DNS MX record resolution.

This may lead to another nifty feature in the next release candidate, final or 1.1 release. I am planning to introduce a domain suggest function. This may be achieved by using a fix/initial suggestion list and the queries against the DNS lookup cache. If everything works out well the i.e. the Tapestry 5 example may offer a suggest function for e-mail addresses.

What does jaev do? The name jaev is the abbreviation for java (advanced) email validation. So the framework does validate e-mails. Sounds quite boring, isn't it? Of course not!

The name of who/what is jaev? The jaev framework is my first open source project! Jepp, I joined the community and giving something back after years of using the frameworks of other people.

What does jaev do? The name jaev is the abbreviation for java (advanced) email validation. So the framework does validate e-mails. Sounds quite boring, isn't it? Of course not! There are some quite good tools for e-mail validation like the one in the Apache commons validator project (I "borrowed" some test cases there). But the e-mail validation in java was quite shallow. If you want to have a more advanced validation, i.e. of the domain, you'll had to do it yourself. The jaev framework tries to fill this gap.

It provides facilities to validate the syntax of an e-mail address with including addresses with names like Niclas Meier <niclas.meier@example.com> (I confess the handling of comments in e-mail addresses has still some flaws, but it's not so important I guess). This is obligatory but the jaev framework offers quite more.

With the jaev framework you'll may check the domain of the e-mail address. The framework uses a local (or server) copy of the IANA top level domain database (http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt) to validate the top level domain. If the top level domain is okay the DNS database will be queries if the domain exists and has MX entries. If a domain has no MX entries you'll have to assume that you will could not relay an e-mail message to the e-mail address. The mail server uses the same mechanism.

A very important feature of the jaev framework is: You have the choice! You are receiving a Result object as outcome of the validation process. The Result contains a code, which specifies the details, and a validity level which specifies the level of validity of an e-mail address. I.e. SYNTAX suggests that an e-mail address is syntactically valid but the domain and account may be invalid. The maximum validity is ACCESSIBLE. With ACCESSIBLE validity the jaev framework was able to verify the existence and accessibility of the e-mail address on the MTA of the e-mail domain.

This is the last big feature of the jaev framework. The framework can connect to the MTA specified in the MX entry of the domain and tries to send an e-mail to the e-mail address. If the mail transfer can be initiated the framework will abort the process, no mail will be send, but we can assure that the e-mail account exits.

Around the three step validation mechanism the framework offers quite simple and extendible construction and configuration mechanisms, examples for JSF, Tapestry 5 and Flex & BlazeD and different acceptance strategies. Timeouts may be applied on different levels and operations, so you can assure that you'll get a Result in a defined amount of time.

I think this is quite a handy package. And I spent lots of my spare time the last four weeks to bring this to life. Maybe someone out there agrees with me and uses the framework in his application.

If you encounter some problems or you would like to contribute/request some features you may post them to the google group or to the issue management system. Maybe there is someone out there who is firm in ANTLR which the jeav framework uses for e-mail parsing.

After nine years and five month it wouldn't be nice of me to leave without a notice and there a quite a lot a very nice people. But in a couple of days I have to consider me as alumni. But this has benefits too. On System Administrator Appreciation Day there will be plenty of topics to talk about.

So what to do in the next couple of days? Now I am sitting here at home on my computer and blogging. But this won't last until the 2 February when I am starting my new job at scoyo. I am pretty exited and not even in a mood for a vacation. On top of it, the January in my old job was strange because nobody had real work for me to do. Okay that's not quite correct, but if you are used to have a very full inbox and a very noisy telephone, it is quite strange if the telephone doesn't ring anymore.

So I decided to push things a little bit at a small project which I started a couple of month ago. It's making quite some progress at this moment, and I am pretty confident that I have some stuff for more blog entries.

Parallel I am working on my Actionscript and Flex skills. It's quite nice but I am desperately looking for an example or application which really challenges me. It's quite a little bit academic at the moment.