Guys, Please improve and extend the following text. The intention is provide people enough information to decide whether Cocoon is the right choice for their problem/project.
Bye, Helma --- The Apache Cocoon project This introduction to Apache Cocoon is intended to highlight some of its unique features and to help decide if it is suited for your purpose. Apache Cocoon Apache Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of 'component pipelines', each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. This makes it possible to use a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming. Cocoon is "web glue for your web application development needs". It is a glue that keeps concerns separate and allows parallel evolution of all aspects of a web application, improving development pace and reducing the chance of conflicts. The Apache Cocoon Project The Apache Cocoon Project is the open source community project developing Apache Cocoon and Cocoon-based application frameworks. With strong foundations in XML-based server-side web application frameworks, the Apache Cocoon Project consists of a group of people that share common values on collaboration-intensive and community-based quality open source development. The Apache Cocoon Project is proud to share these values with its parent organization: The Apache Software Foundation. When to use Cocoon? The flexibility of Cocoon is best used in situations where documents have multiple sources and/or should be presented in different ways. In this context source is a generic concept. It might be a document management system, a database or even user data entry through web pages, previously built by a Cocoon pipeline. When not to use Cocoon? Cocoon doesn't provide a point & click interface to web building. Cocoon is also not intended for pure static documents that are already HTML pages at the source. For that Apache HTTP server is more suited. Requirements for Cocoon? Hardware/platform Cocoon is written in Java as a servlet. To set up a Cocoon-based web application you therefore need Cocoon, running in a servlet engine, with an optional front of an HTTP server. The operating system is of lesser concern. The hardware requirements should meet the requirements of large Java-based applications. Skills To properly use Cocoon your skills should include at least average to in-depth knowledge of XML and XSLT. Knowledge of Javascript is necessary when using forms and knowledge of Java is required when non-standard tasks should be performed. This could be extending Cocoon components or connecting data sources that cannot be connected using the available methods.