Cocoon and Dynamic HTML

I will admit up front that I am pretty ignorant concerning XML and related technologies. I have been looking at Cocoon lately although I haven't tried implementing it yet.
My question: Is Cocoon the best way to go with implementing a web application involving dynamic xml data and serving it up as html, should I hit the Xerxes and Xalan parsers myself instead of handing data off to Cocoon, or is there some other way I should be doing this. I should say up from that I like the idea of using XSLT, but I guess this isn't a requirement. Are there any good articles or tutorials on the web showing any examples?
I have read the Cocoon documents but it isn't really helping me out much, and I didn't quite understand where they were going with writing custom Producers, or how to implement them with dynamic data since they aren't servlets.
Thanks,
Jason