Cocoon Developer's Handbook [Paperback]

Lajos Moczar (Author), Jeremy Aston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 20, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0672322579 | ISBN-13: 978-0672322570 | Edition: 1

Cocoon Developer's Handbook is a thorough, detailed guide to developing XML-based Web publishing applications using Apache's powerful Cocoon framework. This book is a practical, detailed guide for experienced developers who need to learn how to implement the Cocoon framework in a Web XML publishing system. The book is not a theoretical work about XSL, XSP, and XSLT standards, but rather a hands-on explanation of these technologies within the Cocoon framework, with examples and solutions to get developers up and running with Cocoon.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Cocoon Developer's Handbook is a thorough, detailed guide to developing XML-based Web publishing applications using Apache's powerful Cocoon framework. This book is a practical, detailed guide for experienced developers who need to learn how to implement the Cocoon framework in a Web XML publishing system. The book is not a theoretical work about XSL, XSP, and XSLT standards, but rather a hands-on explanation of these technologies within the Cocoon framework, with examples and solutions to get developers up and running with Cocoon.

About the Author

Jeremy Aston has been involved in commercial software development since graduating from college in 1988, originally developing applications using C. He started concentrating on web application development in 1995, working with both Java and Microsoft technologies, quickly specialising in servlets when they emerged. In 1997, Jeremy lead a team of developers on a large servlet based project to develop a Learning Management System which was subsequently redeveloped using EJB, JSP and XML technologies. This project exposed Jeremy to many common issues faced in multi lingual, multi branded application development and into evaluating how emerging XML and XSLT technologies could be harnessed to solve them. When Cocoon appeared and matured, Jeremy could see how like minded individuals had developed a framework that sought to solve many of the problems that had plagued development teams. Since then Jeremy has developed several applications that exploit Cocoon to ease the development of e-learning content. He and his team are currently working on bringing these tools together to form a comprehensive learning content publishing and management system.

Product Details

• Paperback: 816 pages
• Publisher: Sams; 1 edition (December 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672322579
• ISBN-13: 978-0672322570
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,969,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book to get started, June 2, 2003

By 

"superkosto" (Darmstadt, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cocoon Developer's Handbook (Paperback)

I found this book to be a great help for getting started with
the cocoon webpublishing framework. It is much easier to
understand and better structured than the documentation on cocoon.apache.org.

The only thing I didn't like is that some chapters promise information
that they don't provide. E.g. there's a "chapter" about writing a custom
transformer component, that I saw in the table of content and was eager
to read. It turns out that this is just half of a page explaining that the
author wil NOT discuss custom transformers. Also some other chapters
that scratch the surface of some advanced/complex topics lack the depths that I hoped for in a 700 page book.

But nevertheless the book is worth its money and I would recommend it
to anyone who plans his first cocoon project.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very well done, April 2, 2003

By 

Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cocoon Developer's Handbook (Paperback)

Cocoon is a Java-based open source XML content manager and publishing engine from the Apache project. This book was written as an introduction to Cocoon for the developer with a good background in XML and Java but with no background in Cocoon. Part I of the book is an introduction to Cocoon. I found this part of the book to be very difficult and confusing. There was a lot of writing on Generators, Transformers, and Serializers, but the overall discussion was hard to follow. Fortunately, this was only the first 65 pages of the book. Starting with Part II, the book takes on a whole new and much better flavor. After a chapter describing how to install Cocoon, the authors go right into some real examples of how to use Cocoon. Suddenly all the information from Part I which felt incomplete started making sense. The examples and sample code (which need to be downloaded) are excellent in explaining how to use Cocoon. This section goes through example after example, each demonstrating more of the functionality of Cocoon. All the examples worked exactly as advertised and were well designed to demonstrate the many capabilities of Cocoon. Part III of the book discusses advanced topics such as database connectivity, web services, and integrating Cocoon with EJBs. Part IV covers design factors, administration, etc. The last two parts of the book are reference tools. Overall, I though the authors did a good job of making Cocoon easy to understand.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Outdated., June 23, 2008

By 

Matthew Monkan - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cocoon Developer's Handbook (Paperback)

Unless you are using Cocoon 2.1.x or earlier, you are better off trying to learn from online tutorials or by asking questions at an online Cocoon forum. Relative to other Cocoon books available, this one is very good. Relative to 2008 and the release of Cocoon 2.2, this book is almost useless.