Open Source Software

Apache Cocoon is an Open Source Apache Software Foundation plan built on open standards. Recently it has swiftly gained popularity in the Web developer community. The perpetually growing diverse developer and user communities, and the attractiveness of recent Cocoon meets that are magnetizing large numbers, and attendees all across the globe, only further embellishes upon Cocoon’s growing popularity.
What is Apache Cocoon?

Fundamentally, Cocoon is an open Web development skeleton. All the facilities needed to build flexible, maintainable, scalable, and robust XML Server Applications are provided to the developer in this simple to operate program.

Cocoon can, as such, be run from both within an Application Server or from the command line since it is basically executed as an abstract Java engine. Cocoon brings to the fore the models of “component pipelines” and “Cocoon flow” to Web Application development, to form the basis of a potent Web structural design. It boasts of the following features:

1. Content aggregation
2. Pluggable multi-step XML transformations/augmentations (Typically via XSLT)
3. Pluggable Multi-Channeling
4. Internationalization
5. Form handling and validation (Cocoon Forms/Woody)
6. Centralized application flow logic with Cocoon Flow while at the same encouraging maintainable, robust code and promoting Separation of Concerns (SoC)

When considering it a component-based structural framework, Cocoon is deeply modular. It is essentially divided with multiple “prefabricated” pluggable components. Now since these components either consume or produce SAX events, they can therefore be linked together to form SAX processing pipelines. Hence, the term “component pipelines” is frequently used.

The theory of “component pipelines” makes SoC a nearly effortless exercise. How it works is that each component within a pipeline is usually task fitted with a pre designated concern. For example, rendering the same content to a Cell Phone or to a Web Browser becomes a simple matter of plugging in the appropriate “style” component into the pipeline, allowing the “styler” to work independently from the content provider.

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