Why Cocoon Makes a Good Web Publishing System

As explained in the article XML Web Publishing -- Featured Product -- CMS Watch, Cocoon can document data in many different formats. This is what a content publishing system must do. A content management system must merely store, secure, and retrieve many different documents. But a content publishing system is what gives those documents in different file formats to the user when he retrieves it.

JSR-170 defines a Java Repository API for interfacing to a Content Repository. The specification says that such a repository will allow versioning by the author, content indexing and searching, access control, and so on.

JSR-170 just went public about 2 weeks ago. If and when Cocoon supports JSR-170, it will basically become an extremely powerful component in enterprise document content management/publishing systems using a very standard API. Cocoon's inventor, Stefano Mazzocchi, sits on the JSR-170 committee as Apache Software Foundation's representative.

Considering it already has some JSR-168 portlet support and amazing powers of document transformation, and it looks like JSR-170 is a safe bet for some time in the future, Cocoon is well on its way to becoming a very satisfactory front-end for corporations and other organizations' document and reporting systems.