Apache Cocoon is an XML publishing framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation.

All the workflow inside Cocoon is based entirely on XML and it is able to communicate with different data sources as RDBMS, LDAP, native XML Databases or the Filesystem. If the right transformation is used, Cocoon can produce content for a lot of devices and a lot of formats like XML, SVG, XHTML (or any other XML-format), PDF (Apache FOP), RTF etc. Cocoon is programmed in Java and is a Java Servlet. Therefore a Servlet 2.2 compliant servlet engine must be available. Since the Apache Foundation also develops the Apache Jakarta Tomcat Servlet Container, I decided to use Tomcat. Currently I use Tomcat v4.1.24 and Cocoon v2.0.4. Cocoon uses the following mechanisms to process XML documents: