Apache Cocoon, often just called Cocoon, is a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. The framework focuses on XML publishing and it built using the Java programming language. The flexibility afforded by relying heavily on XML allows rapid content publishing in a variety of formats including HTML, PDF, and WML. A powerful content management system, Apache Lenya, has been created on top of the framework. Cocoon is also commonly used as a data warehousing tool or as middleware for transporting data between systems.
Sitemap
The sitemap is at the core of Cocoon. Its here that the web site developer configures the different Cocoon components, and defines the Client/Server interactions in what Cocoon refers to as the Pipeline.
Components
The components within Cocoon are grouped by function.
Matchers
Matchers are used to match user requests such as URLs or cookies against wildcard or regular expression patterns. Each user request is sent through the pipeline until a match is made. It is from here that a particular request is processed.
Generators
Generators create a stream of data for further processing. This stream can be generated from an existing XML document or there are generators that can create XML from scratch to represent something on the server, such as a directory structure or image data.
Transformers
Transformers take a stream of data and change them in some way. The most common transformations are performed with XSLT to change one xml format into another. But there are also transformers that take other forms of data (SQL for example).
Serializers
A serializer takes a data stream, makes any required changes, and sends it to the client. There are serializers that allow you to send the data in many different formats including HTML, XHTML, PDF, RTF, SVG, WML and plain text, for example.
Selectors
Views
Readers
Actions
The Pipeline
The Pipeline is used to define how the different Cocoon components interact with different requests to produce a response.
External links
Last updated: 10-08-2005 06:33:18
