Cocoon Features

• Apache Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concepts of component-based web development and separation of concerns, ensuring that people can interact and collaborate on a project without stepping on each other toes.
• Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of component pipelines, each component on the pipeline specializing in a particular operation (usual pipeline uses a Generator, Transformers and a Serializer). This makes it possible to use a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without requiring programming.
• Advanced Control Flow: continuation-based page flow hides the complexity of request/response processing and is cleanly separated from the view and data components.
• Cocoon is open source software (based on the Apache Software License).
• Cocoon does not duplicate efforts but tightly integrates many technologies.
• Cocoon is in use at many live sites and on many company networks.
• Cocoon has a strong community, with many active developers and more than plenty of active committers!
• There is free support from the thousands of people on our mailing lists and commercial support is available from various companies and consultants.
• There are many Cocoon sessions at different conferences:
  • Cocoon GetTogether
  • ApacheCon
  • Austrian Cocoon Day
  • WJAX
  • JAX
• To get started see the "first steps" documentation track. Basically you only need to download Cocoon, unpack it and follow the simple INSTALL.txt instructions. A minimal version of the Jetty servlet container is included with Cocoon.

As you would expect, all of these scenarios can be combined.

• Dynamic multi-channel web publishing (see below for the possible datasources and output formats)
• Create static content (automatically) by separating data from view
• Offline generation modes with Cocoon's own offline facilities: command-line interface (CLI), ant task, bean. Also with Apache Forrest which utilises Cocoon.
• Dynamic document preparation with Apache Forrest, the 'forrest run' mode. Use many different data input formats, see the transformed result immediately in the browser.
• Advanced web applications with J2EE integration (with separation of your data, the view and the flow logic --> this really means you can change one of the parts without touching another)
• Develop your company portal using the Cocoon Portal framework
• Support multiple clients, layouts and languages (i18n) without code duplication
• Integrate Cocoon with your existing web applications or use it to put a better face on them (page scraping)
• Add full-text search to any datasource that can be converted to XML (see below)
• Use Cocoon as the base for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
• Use Cocoon as the base for your Content Management System (CMS) (see Apache Lenya for a Cocoon based CMS)
• Use Cocoon for producing mobile content (mobile phones, pdas)
• Datawarehouse reporting across multiple formats (see xReporter)

Out of the box, the following data can be converted to XML to be processed by Cocoon pipelines.

• XML Files
• XML based (Web) services
• RDBMS (via JDBC, including connection pooling)
• XML databases
• SAP (r) Systems by adding the SAP JavaConnector see http://service.sap.com/connectors/ (accessible for all SAP (r) customers)
• WebDAV
• CVS (supported by the external project CVSSource)
• Text-based file formats, either using the integrated Chaperon parser for a yacc-like approach to parsing, or the "slop" component (Simple Line Oriented Parser).
• Velocity templates
• JXPath/Jexl templates
• eXtensible Server Pages (XSP) with wide range of logicsheets (database, mailing, ...)
• Python (Jython) and generic BSF support
• JSP
• Filesystem (traversing directory hierarchies)
• Any information provided by environment (request, session)
• Flash
• XMidi
• LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
• Easily aggregate different datasources

• XSLT (The default XSLT-Engine is Apache Xalan, XSLTC is included in the Cocoon distribution, other XSLT-Engines like Saxon can be easily integrated)
• STX (Streaming Transformations for XML)
• XInclude with XPointer framework support

• XML
• HTML
• XHTML
• PDF
• OpenOffice.org/StarOffice
• MS Excel
• RTF
• Postscript
• Charts (see external project Fins)
• Flash
• Plain text
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• MIDI
• ZIP archives

• Coexist and interoperate side-by-side with your existing J2EE solutions (EJB, JMS, ...)
• Build your Portals based on Cocoon
• Scheduler - Run background tasks for maintenance, etc.
• Caching on many levels
• Integrated search engine (using Lucene)
• DELI (detect client configuration)
• Catalog Entity Resolver to map to local copies of DTDs and other resources
• Publish your own WebServices (Apache Axis is integrated)
• Java Mail support
• Easy integration of object-relational frameworks (OJB, Hibernate, ...)
• I18n support (translation support)
• Easily extensible by clear interfaces (write your own components following Avalon patterns)
• Many, many examples and samples
• Configurable build mechanism based on Ant (you decide which parts of Cocoon you need)
• Integration of Java data binding frameworks (Castor, Betwixt)

• Enhanced form handling with strong validation through Cocoon Forms
• Easy integration of (future) XForms clients

• Cocoon can be run in every servlet container or J2EE application server that supports Java Servlets 2.2 and above, e.g. Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss JRun, Resin, Websphere, Weblogic, ...
• Command line execution, without requiring a servlet container
• Embeddable in any Java application