I guess I would characterize Cocoon as an XML processing Engine. One of
the things it can do is act as an MVC. We actually use the Cocoon portal
to present web sites. It has been quite successful for us.
While your description of Cocoon being able to process an XSLT is
certainly true, it is actually quite a bit more complicated than that.
To illustrate, the Cocoon portal starts with an XML file that describes
the pages and portlets in the portal. Each portlet definition can
reference a Cocoon pipeline to generate its content. The portlet
pipeline can generate XHTML or just XML. After all the portlets generate
their content the result will be aggregated into a single XML document
that can then be processed by transformers, which may or may not be XSLTs.
The point is that Cocoon allows you to dynamically generate your XML,
dynamically choose how that XML is manipulated even so far as letting
you dynamically generate your XSLT (why you'd want to do that is another
question, but you could). For example, you could get a list of items
from a database as XML and combine that with some XML configuration
(which could be per user if you want). Your transformers would then be
able to use the XML configuration when manipulating the list of items.
The advantage Cocoon has is that if your business logic can return XML
then Cocoon can manipulate it into almost anything you'd like. This
means that once you have a common agreement on the XML your web
developers can create the view components to render the web pages from
sample XML while the Engineers build out the business logic. If you
don't want to go that far Cocoon does provide ways of accessing data
directly.
On the other hand, things like Spring WebFlow or JSF do a much better
job of capturing the logic flow of complicated applications. But JSF,
WebFlow and Struts all allow their view handlers to be replaced in which
case you could use Cocoon with any of them. In fact, Cocoon comes with a
JSF block to demonstrate how this can be done. By default these
frameworks use JSPs, but JSPs are acknowledged to have serious problems.
Does that help?
Ralph
Mansour wrote:
Thank you for your response.
Before I am going to use maven or look again into it, I need to know a
bit about cocoon. I have used struts2, jsf, and it looks to me that
cocoon is just another mvc frame work that uses xml heavily. I don't
know if this right or wrong. It's advantage is that it can you can
write an xslt and get the xml data to go through this xslt. You can
put more than one xslt to process this data, with each one of them has
a specific target, thus the SoC.
Am I wrong ?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
