WHY COCOON ?

[Marco Spinetti <m....@pisa.iol.it>]

Hi all,
I must write a comparison report between Cocoon and the concurrent products. I find very well to use Cocoon and I consider it a big Web Publishing, but I must justify my choice. What does Cocoon have more than other products? What are the true differences between Cocoon and, to example, Portal-To-Go of the Oracle? Besides the advantages explained as regards the Jsp in the documentation, do other true advantages exist as regards concurrent products? 
Thanks for the help 
I know that this is a non easy question, but it's very interesting one. I'd like that we all togheter start a discussion about this comparison.
Marco
m.spinetti@pisa.iol.it

Re: WHY COCOON ?

[Jeff Turner <je...@socialchange.net.au>]

On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Marco Spinetti wrote:

> Hi all, I must write a comparison report between Cocoon and the
> concurrent products. I find very well to use Cocoon and I consider it
> a big Web Publishing, but I must justify my choice. What does Cocoon
> have more than other products? What are the true differences between
> Cocoon and, to example, Portal-To-Go of the Oracle? Besides the
> advantages explained as regards the Jsp in the documentation, do other
> true advantages exist as regards concurrent products?  Thanks for the
> help I know that this is a non easy question, but it's very
> interesting one. I'd like that we all togheter start a discussion
> about this comparison. Marco m.spinetti@pisa.iol.it

A number of related techniques (JSP, XMLC, Webmacro, Struts, Turbine) are
covered in a recent Javaworld article:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-2000/jw-1103-presentation_p.html

I was disappointed that the article only mentioned Cocoon in passing.

Brett McLaughlin's book "Java and XML" has an online chapter "Web
Publishing Frameworks" which could make a good start:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javaxml/chapter/ch09.html


What serious "XML publishing framework" competitors does Cocoon, other
than Axkit? Some possibilities I've heard of:

Schemantix (http://www.schemantix.com): very early days, but could form
the basis of a "semantic website" as I think Cocoon is meant to become.

IBM have their "Websphere Transcoding Publisher"
(http://www-4.ibm.com/software/webservers/transcoding/), which is "a
server-side, easy-to-use solution for bridging data across multiple
formats, markup languages and devices". It will set you back $20,000.
Anything that expensive has to be good, right? ;P

The Zope people seem to have figured out that DTML ain't the the best
when it comes to separating content, logic and presentation. There's a
proposal for an XML/XSLT-based system
(http://www.zope.org//Wikis/DevSite/Projects/HiperDom/VisionStatement) but
AFAIK it hasn't gone far. Pity..

Further, there's a list of mostly-commercial alternatives here:
http://xmlsoftware.com/publishing/

--Jeff