Jeff, I live and work in Washington, D.C. USA and see the need for Cocoon rising rapidly in government and industry. The primary reason is the lack of "content scalability" from other solutions (ASP,JSP,CFM). These technologies suffer from poor support for pipelining XML easily and their difficulty in handling the myriad of device requirements, i18n, etc. I do believe that the European part of the Cocoon community has pioneered these facets of Cocoon due to the need to solve their immediate i18n and mobile device problems (see the intro part of Carsten & Matthew's book for example).
We're using Cocoon on health care projects that need to protect XML content at a fine-grain level based on a user's role, context, and state of the data. Rather than embedding this logic completely in the persistence layer or code (a DB or EJBs), we're doing it within transforms and actions. This allows us to audit various transactions to ensure they meet HIPAA guidelines at a very detailed level and express those data security policies as constraints on XPath expressions - which non-programmers like physicians can actually read and understand! :-) We've also been able to more easily cast their web applications as web services, VoiceXML services, and as AvantGo sources (e.g., a directory of regional physicians). Finally, the development and deployment of Cocoon solutions are very cost effective (TCD and TCO). We've seen several competitors go out-of-business while trying to move to the .NET platform because the cost of retraining and retooling was too much for them in the current economy. Meanwhile, Java and XML savvy developers are more available than ever in our area and most are enthusiastic supporters of Open Source efforts. The Linux/Java/Tomcat/Cocoon combo is just right for small companies in the current economy. AFAIK, Microsoft still dominates government and industry efforts, but they are not nearly as dominant as 2 years ago. I enjoy the multi-national flavor of Cocoon and see it as a great strength. I'm giving a tutorial on Cocoon next month ( http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/ ) here in D.C. I also noticed that Ivelin Ivanov is giving a talk in Austin, TX USA next month too ( http://www.xmlaustin.org/_html_out/main/events.html ) -- jack John R. Callahan Sphere Software Corporation - The Intelligence of XML [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Ramsdale" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 9:48 PM Subject: Cocoon use worldwide > Hi all, > > I'm just curious about something. I've been reading the Cocoon-users list > for a couple of weeks or so and I see a lot of folks in Europe (and > Australia--Jeff T!) interested in Cocoon. I'm sure it's not a matter of > Americans (& Canadians?) not being interested, I'm sure. (Oh, & Antonio, I > don't want to leave you out!) Right? > > With the utmost respect for the Project I observe that Cocoon is a bit of a > fringe product as far as web development is concerned. I happen to believe > this "fringe" is the leading edge of something big, which is why I'm here. > So here's my question: If any of what I've said above has truth in it, is > there a particular reason why Cocoon might have special appeal to Europeans? > Is there something about the mindset of European programmers that leads them > to Cocoon? Is Open-Source Software viewed differently, on the whole, in > Europe than America? Does this have anything to do with Microsoft's > influence in America? I guess that's more than one question! Interested in > your observations... > > Reason I ask... I live in Seattle (Microsoft-land), and I'd love to find > work using Cocoon and/or Java (but especially Cocoon!), but I don't see as > much mindshare here as I think it deserves. > > Jeff > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > 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]> > --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]>
