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# Apache Cocoon

## What is Cocoon?

Apache Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns (making sure people can interact and collaborate on a project, without stepping on each other toes) 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 "building block" approach for web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming.

Cocoon is "web glue for your web application development needs". It is a glue that keeps concerns separate and allows parallel evolution of the two sides, improving development pace and reducing the chance of conflicts.

Cocoon has been designed to coexist and interoperate side-by-side with your existing J2EE solutions or to give them new functionality without requiring any change in the existing infrastructure.

Cocoon interacts with many data sources, including filesystems, RDBMS, LDAP, native XML databases, SAP® systems and network-based data sources. It adapts content delivery to the capabilities of different devices like HTML, WML, PDF, SVG, and RTF, to name just a few. You can run Cocoon as a Servlet as well as through a powerful, commandline interface. The deliberate design of its abstract environment gives you the freedom to extend its functionality to meet your special needs in a highly modular fashion.

## Cocoon Features

You want to get an overview of all available features of Cocoon in 5 minutes? Read the features list!

## Where can I find it?

To download the latest release (currently 2.1.11) of Apache Cocoon, go to the download area.

If you are looking for a past generation of Cocoon (no longer supported but still available), go to the Cocoon 1.x area.

## Where to start?

With a large serving of core components and about 50 additional "blocks", this has become a big project and it is often hard for newcomers to find their way through the (wonderful) world of Cocoon.

Live demos can be found on the "Cocoon Zone" at http://cocoon.zones.apache.org, including the Supersonic Tour of Cocoon, which gives an overview of the main concepts.

You can also have a look at the documentation tracks to help you locate the parts of the documentation that are the most relevant for your needs. There are few tracks at the moment, but we hope to create more of them depending on the feedback and help that we can get.

Once you are ready to create your own application, the bricks-cms example can be used as a framework and application skeleton.

## More News about Cocoon

Check out our news page for more up-to-date news about Cocoon.

Errors and Improvements? If you see any errors or potential improvements in this document please help us: View, Edit or comment on the latest development version (registration required).