Java and XML

Cocoon 2.0 and Beyond

The next generation of Cocoon, Cocoon 2.0, promises to take the web publishing framework a gigantic leap forward. Cocoon 1.x, which is primarily based on XML being transformed via XSL, still has some serious limitations. First, it does not reduce the management costs of large sites significantly. While one XML document can be transformed into different client views, a significant number of documents will still exist. Generally, either long URIs (such as /content/publishing/books/javaxml/contents.xml ), a large number of virtual path mappings (/javaxml mapped to /content/publishing/books/javaxml ), or a combination of the two, result. In addition, a strict separation of presentation from content from logic is still difficult to accomplish, and even more difficult to manage.

Cocoon 2 focuses on enforcing the contracts between these different layers, therefore reducing management costs. XSP is a centerpiece in this design. In addition, the sitemap (which we look at in a moment) allows the distinction between XSP, XML, and static HTML pages to be hidden from the prying user. Advanced pre-compilation and memory considerations will also be introduced to make Cocoon 2 an even more significant advance over Cocoon 1.x than Cocoon 1.x was over a standard web server.

Servlet Engine Mappings

A significant change in Cocoon 2 is that it is no longer requires a simple mapping for XML documents. While this works well in the 1.x model, it still leaves management of non-XML documents ...