Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Cocoon 2.0.3 and Tomcat

Cocoon 2.0.3 is pretty completely self-contained. The collection of classes in Cocoon and Tomcat has been tuned to avoid any conflicts, and installing Cocoon on an existing Tomcat installation involves adding one file to Tomcat and adding some directives to httpd.conf. As Java installations go, this one is quite friendly.

Unless you have a strong need to customize Cocoon directly, by far the easiest way to install Cocoon is to download the binary distribution, in this case from http://xml.apache.org/dist/cocoon/. Installing Cocoon on Tomcat 3.3 or 4.0 (with the exception of 4.03, for which you should read the docs about some CLASSPATH issues) requires unzipping the distribution file and copying the cocoon.war file into the /webapps directory of the Tomcat installation and restarting Tomcat. When Tomcat restarts, it will find the new file, expand it into a cocoon directory, and configure itself to support Cocoon. (Once this is done, you can delete the cocoon.war file.)

If you’ve left Tomcat running its independent server, you can test whether Cocoon is running by firing up a browser and visiting http://localhost:8080/cocoon on your server. You should see the welcome screen for Cocoon. To move beyond using Tomcat by itself (which is fairly slow, though useful for testing), you have two options, depending on which Apache module you use to connect the Apache server to Tomcat.

The older (but in some ways more capable) option is to use mod_jk, as described in ...