Description:
Apache Cocoon is a mature web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. Cocoon uses component pipeplines, XML and XSLT to allow the separation of the various problem domains (such as data-retrieval, layout design and business logic) encountered when building complex web applications.

Cocoon is an extensible Java components framework that comes with a vast number of components already included. These components allow out-of-the-box integration of data-sources such as XML-files, RDBMS, web-services, LDAP directories, WebDAV repositories and many more. On the publishing side, Cocoon allows the aggregation and flexible presentation of retrieved data into formats such as HTML, WML, XHTML, PDF, SVG, Excel and many others.

Although originally designed as a web publishing framework, Cocoon now incorporates functionality for building portals, form-based applications and provides an innovative model-view-controller architecture for advanced application needs. Apache Cocoon is in widespread use around the globe, in particular for web-sites, multi-channel architectures, portals and CMS applications.

Author: Stefano Mazzocchi and Team
Homepage: http://cocoon.apache.org/

App rating details:
Total votes: 81
Overall rating: 9.34

How'd this get started?: Cocoon started simply enough. In 1998 Jon Stevens -- of Apache JServ, Turbine, Velocity, Anakia, and Tigris Scarab fame -- and I (Stefano Mazzocchi) created scripts that managed the automatic update of the java.apache.org site. The scripts were dead simple: iterate over all the CVS modules that java.apache.org had under the /docs and copy them to the right place.

The problem was that people were continously messing up the docs. Few people want to write documentation for open source projects; when they do, you thank them and don't complain about coherence of style and stuff like that. Or you won't have any docs at all.

The solution was obvious: we needed a way to separate style from content. In late 1998 the first XSL working draft was released and IBM made a Java XSL processor, LotusXSL, available. I downloaded both and started to play around with what was later called XSLT. While playing with this stuff, I quickly grew tired of typing a command line, moving to the browser to see the result, over and over. I wanted a less tedious change-transform-reload cycle. (Con't)


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