Cocoon Developer's Handbook (Paperback)

~ (Author), Jeremy Aston (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 816 pages
• Publisher: Sams (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.com Sales Rank: #676,733 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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

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 (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great tool to become used to Cocoon., May 17, 2003

By	"kffos" (Belgium) - See all my reviews

Besides the necessary introductory work (performed nevertheless in an organic and rational way) the book is a real "hands on" manual. Useful for most of real-world applications.
Chapter 16 on Databases saved me a long work to retrieve otherwise sparse informations from the net.
A great lecture for 'self-teachin night owls'.