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The official documentation is at: http://docs.alfresco.com
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Cocoon Overview - One Pager
What is it?
A web development framework built around the concepts of separation of
concerns (i.e content, logic, style) and component-based web development.
Supports the notion of component pipelines, each component in the
pipeline specializing on a particular operation.
Interacts with many data sources, including filesystems, RDBMS, LDAP,
native XML databases, SAP and network-based data sources.
Content delivery to different devices like HTML, WML, PDF, SVG, and RTF,
etc.
High-level Features
Site Maps (i.e. pipelines)
The types of components that can be included in a pipeline...
- Generator - creates XML e.g. read from file, db, request etc
- Transformer - e.g XSLT, I18N text substitution
- Serializer - HTML, XML, PDF etc
- Matcher - Match Incoming URI to pipeline
- Selector - Advanced Matcher - use expressions to control pipeline
- Action - Hook Incoming URI to application logic
- Reader - all-in-one generator, transformer and serializer
Control Flow
- Defines how a Web Application flows between pages
- Not a state machine, but script (Flowscript, actually, Javascript++)
- Views (JXTemplate, XSP/JPath and Velocity rendering)
- Bind together with pipelines
Forms (CForms, formally Woody)
- UI Widgets
- Validation
- State mangement
- Form Rendering
XSP
- XML oriented sripting page (just like ASP, JSP but in XML)
Offline Generation
- Create static versions of pages and dump out to files for fast access
- Sort of web-site publish
Other
Alignment with Alfresco Content Management Framework
DC's thougths:
- Cocoon is not a Content Management Framework, as it says on the front page, it's a Web Application Framework. I can't see versioning, categorisation, searching, access control, etc.
- The CMF can easily be a source for a Cocoon Pipeline
- Develop CMFGenerator to retrieve content out of Repository (or perhaps, hook into their Repository block? api)
- Cocoon search mapped to CMF Lucene implementation
- The CMF can employ Cocoon pipeline services for Transformation
- The CMF can employ Cocoon for web site publishing
- Control Flow scripting is unique (don't know of anyone else who uses script to define the flow logic of a web app)
- Cocoon Forms is a competitor to JSF, Struts
- A Content oriented Web App can be built with a combination of CMF and Cocoon
RD's thougths:
- Cocoon Pipeline's SAX event model is 'right-on' and the concept is extremely powerful.
- The whole engine seems way too coupled with HTTP / Servlet Concepts
- It's time for a revolutionary step with this framework -- too many outdated components under the hood.
