Cocoon 1.6 on Tomcat 3.0-dev (CVS as of Monday)

[Berin Loritsch <bl...@infoplanning.com>]

I just want you guys to know that this framework rocks.  It had an even smoother installation,
although the first installation was a learning process.  I just had a couple of quick notes:

XSP does not work unless you use the officially released Xerces (the CVS version breaks
the implementation).  Not that I am terribly concerned, XSP does not apply to what I am
trying to do (separation of content, style, and logic).  I also noticed that the code for one
of the XSP pages is particularly sensitive to URL mapping.  I am referring to the view-code.xml
page.  I have my Cocoon installation mapped to the directory /xml on my server, and that
page erroneously tries to add that directory in the path of the file it is loading.

I noticed that the PDF rendering (Formatting Objects) is doing particularly well.  Unfortunately,
the SVG image did not render.  All the rest of the information displayed properly.  One thing
I am very interested in: using FO for automagically generating HTML for the client.  Example
(using the same XML and XSL files:  the Netscape client gets the page optimized for it, and
Internet Explorer gets the same page optimized for it.  This would be in lieu of separate XSL
style sheets for each client.  In a perfect world, you would only need one formatter for each
client type.  This approach will allow for very dynamic content that requires client specific
code.

That type of solution would probably be down on the list of priorities, mainly because it is very
complex, and difficult to do in a fast way.  We would need domain experts on each browser
that know the uniqueness for each browser.  Both of the major browsers can do many
of the same things, but require different methods of getting there.  Example: text font and
styling--with Netscape, the <FONT> tag is more reliable; but in IE, the STYLE="" attribute
would be the way to go.

Anyway, this thing is the bomb.  We are definitely going to use it for our customer, and I
think we can convince the rest of the company to adopt it for future web applications.  With
just the basic Producer and DCP functionality, Cocoon already has what we need to
communicate with the applications.  The fact that we can have multiple interfaces for a client
without incredible amounts of rework, will sell this to our customers.

Bravo!