XML News from Saturday, November 19, 2005

The Apache Project has released Cocoon 2.1.8, an open source "web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of 'component pipelines', each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. This makes it possible to use a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming." Cocoon can assemble data from many sources including filesystems, SQL databases, LDAP, native XML databases, and SAP. It can customize the output to generate HTML, WML, PDF, SVG, and RTF from the same inputs. Processes it supports include XSL transformation and XInclude resolution. Cocoon can run as a servlet inside an existing web server or standalone through a commandline interface. New features in 2.1.8 include:

Many enhancements to the forms block including AJAX support for partial updates to a form, a new tree widget, some experimental code for reusable form libraries (coded as a part of the Google Summer of Code project) and a sample showing how to create forms using relational databases with zero java code.
Cocoon Stack Traces
Many enhancements to the portal block, including improved caching mechanisms, support for the Web Services For Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard, and provided components for database access using OJB.
A new JCR block allowing access to JCR repositories such as JackRabbit
A new validation block providing the ability to validate XML in a pipeline chosing from a range of schema languages (DTD, XSD, RNG)
The ability to use Cocoon pipelines to render JSF pages (using the JSF controller)