Supersonic Tour of Apache Cocoon

All documents and files included in this tour are Copyright (C) 1999-2004 by the Apache Software Foundation.

You can generate a printable single-page version of this tour here (requires an Internet connection for some example pages).

Overview

This supersonic tour of Apache Cocoon will give you a quick overview of what Cocoon is and does.

We won't go deep into any part of Cocoon, but will rather get an overall feel of what's in Cocoon.

The only parts that we will study in some detail are the following Cocoon components, which are becoming the mainstream way of using Cocoon:

• The pipelines, used to transform XML data obtained from various sources into many differents output formats like HTML, PDF, SVG, XML, bitmapped pictures, etc.
• The Flow subsystem, a powerful yet simple to use mechanism to handle the interaction between multiple web pages and forms in a Web application.
• The Cocoon Forms subsystem, which uses simple and modular definitions of Web-based forms to allow java beans, XML documents or other objects to be edited via the Web.

Running this application

If you're reading this documentation on paper and would like to study the application directly in Cocoon, you will find it under blocks with samples on the Cocoon samples page.

Studying this application

The complete source code of this tour is found under src/blocks/tour in the Cocoon source code tree. There is one directory with its own sitemap for each part of the tutorial, so that you can easily dig deeper in your areas of interest.

Code excerpts

Note that (according to the lazyness is a virtue rule), most of the sitemap, flowscripts, XSLT transforms and other code excerpts are dynamically inserted into this documentation from the corresponding source files. This avoids having to copy and paste code and ensures that the code you see stays up to date.

Contents

Introduction

• Supersonic Tour of Apache Cocoon
• What is Cocoon?
• Use cases
• Facts
• Resources
• Business layer options

Pipelines

• Pipelines overview
• Basic pipelines
• Generating graphics
• XML news source

Multi-channel publishing

• Output formats
• PDF example

The Flow subsystem

• Flow examples
• Number guessing game
• Multi-page form
• Java shapes: using Java objects from Flow

Cocoon Forms sample application

• The Bean Editor application
• Java beans
• Tasks list
• Single task
• Forms
• Flowscript