I've reviewed the New Riders Cocoon book and the review is available here.
http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=02/09/19/1722242 Oh ok, here it is too. Title: Cocoon: Building XML Applications Author: Matthew Langham Author: Carsten Ziegler Publisher: New Riders URL: http://www.newriders.com ISBN: 0735712352 Price: 30.99 UKP Topic: non-fiction Topic: computing Topic: XML Reviewer: Alex McLintock Reviewer URL: http://www.DiverseBooks.com/ If you have a genuine need for an XML backed website and you want to build it using java tools then you could do a lot worse than to choose Apache's Cocoon suite of tools. Cocoon is built up froma a large number of different java based programs (all from Apache Software Foundation) but has suffered up till now from a lack of paper based documentation. This is the first Cocoon book which I have seen and I recommend it as such... your first Apache Cocoon book. The book starts off with far too much information about web applications without specific relevance to Cocoon. I don't see how this could be relevant to someone wanting to build a web application - surely they would know this already. Do we really need step by step instructions on how to install Tomcat? Surely it is the readers' responsibility to sort that sort of thing out. We don't expect explanations of how to run Unix for instance. The step by step explanation of the sitemap and pipelines whilst looking at the Hello World app is most welcome. Understanding the sitemap is the most important feature specific to Cocoon. It does use Java, JSP, JDBC, XML, XSLT, and loads of other techniques, but these aren't unique to Cocoon. The sitemap is an XML file which basically describes the whole site... and how to respond to any request. I have been using Cocoon for several months now and so I was hoping for a book which could teach me a lot. Unfortunately it only taught me a few things, but what it did show me were gems. One thing which I have been looking for for ages was how to do a photo album which changes often. This book gives a nice clean example of that so I can drop files in a directory and have them listed in my website properly. But... There is always a "but". This book doesn't have enough examples. They could have put loads on the CD, but didn't. For instance, one could write a whole book on the subject of FOP - the component of Cocoon which can take XML and convert it to PDF and other fancy formats. There is an SVG example, but just the one. There is one big example: a news portal. It is fine as far as it goes, but I wanted more. There are some reference chapters for those who want to understand more about the Internals, and the different sitemap components. Chapter 10 introduces XSP (the XML equivalent to JSP) which is used to enhance the news portal example. The reference Appendices are a hefty 120 pages long, and much more readable than the online equivalent, but we shall see how up to date it stays." Openweb Analysts Ltd, London. Software For Complex Websites http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ Open Source Software Companies please register here http://www.OWAL.co.uk/oss_support/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
