...What we would "like" to do is leverage our Cocoon software for our CD-Rom based products - as opposed to building our own CD based reporting framework. Possibly using a tool like JBuilder or Delphi for a "front-end" to the application.
Is this possible?
It is certainly possible to run Cocoon from a CD without any installation, but you didn't indicate what kind of apps you're thinking about, is that browsing and searching documents or more than that?
Running from CD might require including the JDK on the CD for the various platforms that you're using (fairly easy if the licenses allow it), or setting up Cocoon to run from Java WebStart, started from a browser page (slightly harder and AFAIK you'd need to sign all jars used).
Has anybody done this?
I didn't do it with Cocoon (yet) but I've done java-based CDs in the past, using pre-generated browsable HTML combined with a search engine that could run as an applet (QuestAgent, http://www.jobjects.com/). This is also something that you could use depending on your app's requirements.
Can we run Cocoon without Tomcat (or similar servlet engine?) - I know there is a CLI, but does this eliminate the need for a servlet engine? - OR - Do we need to find some way to deploy the servlet engine on the client's computer?
Cocoon can run with most servlet engines, and some of them are very lightweight.
The Cocoon 2.1 build system generates a setup based on a limited version of the Jetty servlet engine.
If you follow the instructions in the INSTALL.txt file to run "cocoon.sh servlet" (or .bat), Jetty is used to start Cocoon without requiring any installation. This is not meant for production use but you could certainly adapt Jetty or another lightweight servlet engine to run from a CD, requiring only a temporary directory to store work files during execution.
You can also use "build standalone-demo" to build a standalone version of Cocoon which uses the same limited version of Jetty contained in two subdirectories of the build directory. This might be able to run straight from CD as Jetty uses the standard temporary directory of the system (/tmp for example), but I haven't tested it.
Hope this helps, -- Bertrand Delacretaz independent consultant, Lausanne, Switzerland http://cvs.apache.org/~bdelacretaz/
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