That was a great read Alex, thanks for sharing.

On the subject of rendering emails, I've got a service that can render components without the need for a web request. It returns a JSONObject containing the content and the javascript etc that is normally sent to the browser. It does this by spoofing a request and response. I required this for push but perhaps I could extract it out to provide offline templating for emails etc.

https://github.com/uklance/tapestry-cometd/blob/master/src/main/java/org/lazan/t5/cometd/services/internal/ComponentJSONRendererImpl.java