coocoon for content rich, portal-like websites?

[Axel Janssen]

Hi Wiliam,
taking a quick glance at the real life examples at http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/link/livesites.html
I would say that coocoon seems to be specialized for a certain kind of websites:
There's is lots of content and I would call them portals.
Is that right?
Does cocoon support typical features for that kind of sites like for example full text searching?
Axel
[ November 06, 2002: Message edited by: Axel Janssen ]

[Ajith Kallambella]

Put simply, Cocoon is a front controller Servlet that performs dynamic server-side XSLT transformations.
We have been using Cocoon to support multiple client types( browsers, hand-helds and perhaps Voice based responses in future). The selection criteria was certainly not based on rich content generation( asp and JSP beats Cocoon in GUI vocabulary), but was based on heterogenous client support and dynamic transformations. We use Producer based architecture to generate XML data.
Cheers,

[Frank Daly]

Brett McLaughlin in his book Java and XML 1st edition demonstrates cocoon. This chapter is online at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javaxml/chapter/ch09.html
Frank

[William Brogden]

taking a quick glance at the real life examples at http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/link/livesites.html
I would say that coocoon seems to be specialized for a certain kind of websites:
There's is lots of content and I would call them portals.

Generally speaking Cocoon offers a lot of features for creating Portal type sites. In addition to the ease of supporting multiple client types as Ajith said, using XML for data storage makes it easy to manage a LOT of content.
There is a text indexing and retrieval system based on a technology called xindice, but I'm not sure how well that works with really large sites.
Many cool open source projects to handle various formats in XML have found that Cocoon is a good base to work from. For example we have the POI implementation of Microsoft's spreadsheet format and the FOP project to create PDF documents on the fly.
Bill