What’s The Best Way To Learn Cocoon?
I've got a few little projects in mind that I think Cocoon would be a good fit for and one system already in production that uses Cocoon (badly) so I'm thinking I need to work take some time and really learn how to use it properly and what the best practices are for using it.
So, oh great Cocoon guru's who hangeth outeth at planet apache (and those who don't), what's the best way to go about learning Cocoon? Book recommendations, article recommendations etc? Where do I learn best practices and get a good overview of all the parts etc rather than just how to do specific things?
July 30th, 2005 at 9:46 pm
An up-to-date “big picture” intro is sorely missing from the Cocoon docs at the moment.
Here are a few pointers, which might help until anyone wants to sponsor me to write that book ;-)
The Supersonic Tour, found in “samples / blocks with samples” after starting Cocoon, or online at http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/, gives a good overview of the basics, using only “mainstream” components. But it doesn’t go far enough in terms of building database applications or accessing your own java code.
I’ve heard that the CHS application (http://cocoondev.org/main/117/43.html) is a good example of using the Spring container to manage your components and Hibernate to access databases, but I haven’t studied it in detail.
To summarize, I’d suggest starting with the Supersonic Tour, then studying how to integrate a modern component manager like Spring or Hivemind, then how to use OJB (my favorite) or Hibernate to access a database. This should give you all the required tools to build a “typical” application.