JBossDeveloper

Yes, for Seam it makes sense to leverage what's there. But in our case it's doesn't seem appropriate. jBPM is intended to be embeddable. Hence we shouldn't pull in large dependencies for simple things.

To sum up the real situation
- It is not a real hack, since it is mostly what seam also does in their mock
- It works OUTSIDE an appserver, so standalone (that was the whole idea of the bootstrapping)
- A large use base of jBPM comes from seam users
- There is a templating mechanisme for email within JBoss, don't let JBoss become a second Apache Foundation (having a second workflow solution is already weird)
- Seam is not needed at all (yes there is some code duplication then, but if a seam mail subproject is created with some patches I have in mind, then probably one small jar is needed from seam
- No need to learn 101 things (as Pete states)
- the JBoss Tools html designer can be leveraged to design the mail in a wysiwyg way
- Using it is as simple as

 StandaloneFacelets sf = StandaloneFacelets.init();
 Facelet f = sf.getFacelet("/myTemplate.xhtml");
 Stringwriter sw = new StringWriter();
 f.apply(ctx, sw);

Max Andersen blogged about it: http://blog.hibernate.org/Bloggers/Everyone/Year/2006/Month/02/Day/03

Cheers,
Koen

and there is a freemarker editor in JBoss Tools isn't there?

Have a look at http://code.google.com/p/saxon-extensions/wiki/EmailEmitter.
Templates is much easier to use than velocity and well understood by designers.

Just to clear a few things.

Velocity or freemarker will template the message body, when Email Emitter externalize message generation, and you can customize any part of the message, headers, body, sender, etc.

And email template can be tested standalone by a designer outside of the server.