Cocoon in a nutshell (the essentials)

  • TARGET-AUDIENCE: beginners
  • COCOON-RELEASES: 2.0.3, 2.0.4
  • DOCUMENT-STATUS: *draft* reviewed released

_I would rewrite this and fill it up with pointers to
other documents. if no one does, i'll come back here and enhance it – Hussayn_

Cocoon binary distributions come with a "kitchen sink" policy. That is that they give you everything they have including the kitchen sink. Most of it is documentation and samples. If you wish to create a new custom Cocoon based application that just has the Cocoon engine and your additions to it, you probably want to know what you can take out. First of all, copy your cocoon distribution so you have a backup and a reference. Now we can start deleting things from our copy. The following structure represents a skeleton cocoon install with no configured pages.

  • sitemap.xmap
  • META-INF
    • MANIFEST.MF
  • WEB-INF
    • classes
      • CatalogManager.properties
    • lib
      • All of the jar files in the distribution.
    • cocoon.xconf
    • logkit.xconf
    • web.xml

Note that in the manifest file there is a large list of the cocoon libs. This is necessary for deployment as a packaged war on many application servers. Its recommended you just append your manifest entries to the file given. Anything not on the list above you can feel free to trash. This structure will leave you will all of the capability of cocoon but nothing being used. Its a point at which to start from. In the sitemap file, you can delete all the pipelines and action sets. Some actions pertaining to particular samples, such as the database actions for the employee sample, can also be removed. Read the sitemap file carefully. Don't be too distressed if you delete something an need it later, you can always refer back to the original distribution to recreate it.

In the future there may be a skeletal distribution such as I have shown here. It is on the rather lengthy "to do" list for the cocoon developers. Until then, this should let you do it the old fashioned way.

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  • AUTHOR: Robert Simmons
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  • REVIEWED-BY:BR
  • REVIEWER-CONTACT:BR
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