Category: XML

The lingua franca of the Internet.

Cocoon book didn’t cut it

I saw a Cocoon book at Borders this weekend but I decided not to get it. It didn’t cover 2.1. I did work through the doc and a couple of the how-to’s. They didn’t go as deep as I wanted. Of course, if you just want to transform XML into HTML and PDF, there’s not much to it. The continuations stuff looks more meaty.

Xindice XML database

Installed Xindice as a standalone program so I could use it for other stuff rather than using the version built-in to Cocoon. I moved all of my apache stuff so that there weren’t any spaces in the directory names, but my Documentum stuff still left spaces in my classpath. Rather than update my classpath to use the no-space version of the directory names, I updated the Xindice bat files to put the classpath variable in qutoes. That worked.

Lenya WCM

Tried getting Lenya going tonight. I didn’t have any luck with the binary build so I went with the source build. That helped. Word to the wise, though. The Lenya site says it requires Cocoon 2.1.2. It looks like it has to be exactly 2.1.2 not 2.1.2 or higher.

I tried Lenya 1.2rc2 with Cocoon 2.1.4 and it didn’t work. It looks like that version of Lenya is expecting xercesImpl-2.5.0 rather than 2.6.1 which is what Cocoon 2.1.4 comes with. I updated the Lenya Ant build XML file to use the newer version of Xerces but Lenya choked on it when it tried to come up

Cocoon 2.1.4

I downloaded Cocoon 2.1.4 recently. I hadn’t looked at it in at least a year, maybe two. Tonight I got the chance to get it up and running. Man, has it come a long way! I don’t know enough about it yet but it seems very powerful. (I am easily impressed by the slick demos). I sort of got the same tingly feeling I got when I first installed Zope. Cocoon is much more XML-centric, though. It’s also got Apache Axis built-in so it is web services ready. There are many other built-in Apache projects that add to its power but they are too numerous to mention here.
Here are a couple of links…
and some of the OOTB samples I thought were cool…
— All of the form processing framework samples (JXForms, Woody)
— XML:DB
— SVG, PDF, JPEG, and PNG on-the-fly generation (Batik, FOP)
— Web services (SOAP and Axis)
— Lucene search engine
— xMIDI (just for fun)
— Linotype blog example, although I had problems getting it to run
If you have the time or the inclination, download Cocoon and look through the samples. The build process is paineless. You don’t even need Tomcat to play with it because it embeds its own servlet container (Jetty).
In the early days of Cocoon I remember the install being sketchy and the samples library being pretty lame. You should see it now. Your head will start spinning.
Cocoon seems powerful but also complex. I’ve only scratched the surface but I’ve seen enough to want to learn more.