Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Cocoon 1.8 and JServ

Go to http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/index.html for an introduction to Cocoon and a link to the download page. You will see that a number of mysterious entities are mentioned: Xerces, Xalan, FOP, Xang, SOAP. These are all subsidiary packages that are used to make up Cocoon. What you need of them is included with the Cocoon download and is guaranteed to work, even though they may not be the latest releases. This makes the file rather large, but saves problems with inconsistent versions.

If you are running Win32, download the zipped executable; if Unix, then download the sources. We got Cocoon-1.8.tar.gz, which was flagged as the latest distribution.

As usual read the README file. It tells you that the documentation is in the .../docs subdirectory as .html files — what it might mention, but did not, is that these files are formatted using fixed-width tables for a wide screen and, if you want hardcopy, don’t print out well. They are not easy to read either, so more flexible versions, suitable for reading and printing, are in the .../docs.printer subdirectory. There is a snag, which appeared later: the printable files are completely different from the screen files and omit a crucial piece of information. Still, as the reader will have gathered, this is normal stuff in the world of Java.

What follows is a minimum version of the installation process.

It seemed sensible to read install.html. Since Cocoon is a Java servlet, albeit rather a large one, you need a Java ...