Java and XML

Installation

In other chapters, installation instructions generally involved pointing you at a web site where you could obtain a distribution of the software and letting you add the included jar file to your class path. Installing a framework such as Cocoon is not such a trivial task, and we document the procedures to make this happen here. If you want the very latest versions of the framework, you should download a copy of CVS, the Concurrent Versioning System. This allows you to obtain the code from the actual source code repository rather than the less frequent code releases, which usually occur at version releases. You can get CVS from http://www.cyclic.com/cyclic-pages/howget.html.

With Cocoon, we look at the 1.x version of the framework. Although by the time you are reading this, the public 2.0 release will probably be available in a beta form, at this time, Cocoon 2.0 is in an alpha state, and is only available through CVS access. Because of the high amount of change still anticipated in the Cocoon 2.0 framework, we will focus on the 1.x version tree, as that is being used most often today. At the end of this chapter, we do take a brief look at the upcoming features of Cocoon 2, which is scheduled for a full release late in 2000. If you are looking at using Cocoon in a production environment today, you will definitely want to stay with the 1.x branch until Cocoon 2 has been released and stabilized.

If going through the procedures you find yourself encountering problems, ...