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# Apache Cocoon User Guide

## What's in this track?

This track points to Cocoon documentation and external references which will help you to use Cocoon for web publishing.

By web publishing, we mean generating various formats (HTML, PDF, RTF, etc.) out of XML documents, as opposed to web applications which include transactions, database storage, etc.

## Prerequisites

If you have not installed Cocoon yet, have a look at the First steps track.

## Web Publishing Track

### HTML/PDF How-To

The HTML/PDF How-To shows some simple examples of HTML and PDF publishing, it is a good start to find out how this is done with Cocoon.

### XSLT

Although there are many options for web publishing with Cocoon, XSLT transforms are probably the most common way of transforming XML documents into the target XML vocabularies required to generate the various formats. The above How-To document points to some reference material about XSLT, which you might want to study if you decide to use this option.

### Generators

If you need to convert different data sources to XML, you will have to study the available Cocoon Generators, to see what options are available. We hope to have a database queries track soon, to give more detail about the available options to access databases.

### Serializers

At the other end of the pipeline, you will need a Serializer to generate the target formats. Have a look a the available Serializers and the corresponding samples to find out which ones you need to to generate your target output formats.

### Samples

While looking for Generators and Serializers, do not forget to look at the samples. Searching the sitemap files for the names of components will tell you which samples use which components.

## Comments

Care to comment on this Track? Help keep this document relevant by passing along any constructive feedback to the cocoon-docs mailing list.

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