ApacheCon 2004: Why the Cocoon project rocks

The community

People say that Cocoon has a strong sense of community spirit. Members of this community are collectively working together writing great software in a creative and effective manner.

But even more, over time the community has grown in some social aspects that can be felt on gatherings like the yearly GetTogether. (Held in Ghent, Belgium at the beginning of October). In 2004 this event brought together more than 130 people from 17 countries to talk about and work on Cocoon during a very successful hackathon and conference.

The mix of different ways of working, different cultures and different levels of business involvement with Cocoon has helped create a very rich and diverse community.

The project

Although many companies have been using Cocoon in production for several years, the last months have seen several public announcements by important media groups, top 100 banks and other companies of which several had been keeping a low profile before, about mission-critical and high performance websites and applications built on Cocoon.

More than "just" a web publishing framework, Cocoon is quietly becoming a world-class applications platform, enabling a wide range of applications to be created efficiently and in a very flexible way.

Innovation and integration are substantial goals of this project. With the latest versions, stability has become another one.

The software

Last but not least, the Cocoon code has matured a lot in the last year, with clear directions about several key parts being agreed upon by the community, and stabilized in their APIs and functionality.

Despite this maturity, work has recently begun, in parallel, on an important rewrite of the core internal components, which should eventually make Cocoon even more modular and adaptable to various needs.