More on Cocoon 2.2 and Maven

Well a couple of months ago I blogged to talk about a number of projects I was working on using Cocoon 2.2 and Maven 2. Here is a little catch up. Both are on the point of going live, and since my last post, Cocoon 2.2 has finally been fully released.

My experiences are all good with both, although as per usual, and particularly where more than one technology is involved, the learning curve is definitely a factor to be taken into consideration, particularly if time is short, or your development team is small.

First up, the company website I mentioned, is due to go live in a matter of weeks now. Crafting it with Cocoon 2.2 was great fun, so neat and tidy. Managing it with Maven 2 is also very efficient. The time required to make everything work well in Maven was pretty immense though, for example the need for a private corporate repository, and a proxy to enable reproducible builds at any time.

I mentioned before that I had no experience with working with databases through Cocoon, and that seemed at the time to be a daunting prospect. Well it turns out Cocoon 2.2's integration with Spring is as watertight as it says on the box, and therefore, you can do anything you like with technologies like Hibernate, marvellous!

Separation of concerns is still to me one of the very best features of Cocoon, and twinned with powerful transformation pipelines, you get the complete set of tools to work with.

Thanks to the Cocoon and Maven teams for providing such excellent tools to work with.