Cocoon is too complex for consumption?

[Robert Simmons]

That is the impression that I am getting and I'm curious as to feedback from list users.   Basically my experience is one of confusion. I downloaded the war and deployed it. The samples and stuff deploy fine but now where does one go from there? The samples and tutorials are splattered all over the net. Users tell me to go to wiki (which is down allot or just really slow) to find information but its like hunting for an needle in a haystack. The default cocoon war contains thousands of files. What does one do to deploy a new application? copy the whole immense framework to a new jar? That seems overly complex for a user that just wants to generate some XML and some XSL and leap off to the races. Its almost like cocoon is buried under complexity.   Now I am even being told that in order to use the product, I need to get it from CVS and do builds and so on. For the end user this is just not a viable option. They just want to fire off some XSP pages, some XML and drop it in a war and go. Some 12 hours after I started investigating this technology,  still have only a vague clue of what I would need to actually accomplish something. The content of the war is a big part of that problem. The word "overkill" immediately leaps to mind. For the new person to this technology, knowing what each thing does, is nearly impossible.   I guess that's what it comes down to for me in the end. I started evaluating using cocoon to replace a static servlet that generates XML manually. The goal was to simplify things by using cocoon. I thought I could just transform that servlet into a cocoon generator, drop it in the right place and go. Doing a lengthy build process, configuration, decoding of what the MOUNTAIN of values in the MOUNTAIN of configuration files mean is just a waste of time for me.   In the end, I suppose I'm going to have to stick with the servlet strategy. as a professional developer, I don't have 2 weeks to waste figuring out how to get something working. You look at tomcat for example. The hello world is simple. You drop the minimal 3 class war in tomcat and away it goes. Intimate knowledge of tomcat is not necessary. In fact most users of tomcat authentically don't care about its implementation.   So how could cocoon be of use to me and others like me? If I could build a war with simply any special classes I have (generators, etc) my XSL pages and a sitemap. Then I deploy that war and cocoon figures out how to wire things together.   I guess I'm rambling a bit and I'm sorry. Its just frustrating to spend several hours on something and essentially get nowhere. Cocoon may be a powerful product, but it will never go mainstream in the web, imho, with its level of difficulty in understanding it. The death of XML based web publishing perhaps? Is this why JSP is taking over? Although a flawed paradigm, it allows the neophyte to drop a single hello-world.jsp into a tiny war with 2 deployment descriptors and go. This is the simplicity that the users of the product want. Fiddling around with the base core of the product you are using just isn't in the budget.   Well, I will stop babbling now and look forward to comments.