Java and XML, Second Edition

Installation

In other chapters, installation instructions generally involved pointing you at a web site where you could obtain a distribution of the software and letting you add the included jar file to your classpath. Installing a framework such as Cocoon is not quite as simple, and the procedures are documented here. Additionally, Cocoon has instructions online for various other servlet engines; check these out at http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/install.html.

Source Code or Binaries

The first thing you need to do is decide if you want the source code or binaries for Cocoon. This decision actually can be boiled down even further: do you want the very latest features, or the most reliable build? If you are a hardcore developer who wants to dig into Cocoon, you should get a copy of CVS and pull the latest Cocoon source code from the xml.apache.org CVS repository. Rather than detail this process, as it probably involves the minority of you, I’ll simply refer you to the CVS Pocket Reference by Gregor Purdy (O’Reilly). This will get you set up, in concert with the instructions online at http://xml.apache.org/cvs.html.

For those interested in trying Cocoon out or actually running it in production, download the latest Cocoon binary from http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/dist. As I write, the latest version, 1.8.2, is available for Windows (Cocoon-1.8.2.zip) and Linux/Unix (Cocoon-1.8.2.tar.gz). Once you download the archive, expand it to a temporary directory that you can work with. The most ...