Follow up to the scripting languages JSR-223... I must emphasize my dissatisfaction with the web-only nature of the scripting language support initiative. One of the biggest issues I have with JSP is that it is intimately tied to the HTTP request and response. Velocity comes to the rescue (and I'm sure there are other alternatives - please add them to the comments below). Once upon a time the Velocity team even considered submitting it as a JSR.

To the JSR-223 team: please consider broadening the design to allow for scripting hooks in plain ol' J2SE - this will allow us to have a standard way to do things like the following:

• Send templated e-mails (something which we've used Velocity for)
• Generating static templated files, such as a static HTML view of my personal blog (again, I'm using Velocity currently).
• Custom code generators. Stuart Halloway has a code generation example using JSP in his wonderful book, and I suspect he did it this way to keep to pure out-of-the-box Java rather than introducing a third-party tool like Velocity. His example required he run the code generator in a web browser, and cut and paste the results to their final destination.
• I'd like to see more integration with scripting languages to control business rules, allowing run-time flexibility.
• And much more, I'm sure (leave your uses scripting within Java in the comments below)