John likes Cocoon a lot.
He started using it in 2001. He discovered it because it was bundled in Borland J Builder.
A year or so later he used it to create a kind of neat reporting system, using Cocoon 2.0.4.
- Data was read from SQL servers via JDBC or EJB servers via Jython.
- Data was serialized to a simple but general format that could serialize all info in most Java objects.
- A simple XSLT script reformatted the XML data into a formatted canonical report format - still in XML.
- A second XSLT report would convert the canonical representation of the report from generic to document specific XML (or HTML) file format.
- XML would then be passed to the appropriate serializer to complete conversion to the desired format specified by the user.
Seeing Cocoon 2.1 come out in August 2003 is like a dream come true!
Other languages John enjoys programming in include:
- Python Language
- PrologLanguage
- CLIPSLanguage
- LISP
- JavaScript
- AppleScript
- JSP
- XSLT
Many of these languages can be accessed from Java code using BeanScriptingFramework.
SWI-Prolog can be accessed from Java code using the JPL API demonstrated here quite beautifully.