What you *need* to know about Cocoon - a path through the jungle

Duration:
45 minutes

Target audience:
  -Beginners
  -Project leaders
  -People who are evaluating the suitability of Cocoon to their teams (or vice-versa;-)


Abstract:

To beginners, Cocoon's rich toolset is sometimes perceived as a scary jungle of functionality.

Where to start? What to learn? Will I make it? Will it be worth it?

Focusing on the essential components and concepts of Cocoon, this talk helps you answer those questions, and provides a roadmap to shorten the trip and make it as enjoyable as possible.

We start with an overview of an actual web application built on Cocoon, and show how understanding a handful of essential concepts and components (Pipelines, Flow, Forms, basic Avalon concepts) is sufficient to start building powerful applications.

There's a catch, however: as with any complex framework, this is only true if the developer or team have the right skillset and mindset.

To help people evaluate their (or their team's) potential with Cocoon, we describe the skills needed to work with it at various levels (multi-channel publishing, database access, java business logic programming, debugging, etc.), and describe the kind of "know a little about many things" mindset that helps so much in getting started or going forward with Cocoon.  


About the presenter:

Independent since 1989, Bertrand Delacrétaz is a software architect, programmer and teacher based in Switzerland.

Contracted as lead architect and programmer for two major projects of the Swiss Parliament's IT department in 1997 ("CuriaVista") and 1999 ("verbalix"), Bertrand likes to build Software That Works - pragmatic systems based on the Unix philosophy of small testable components connected by clean interfaces.

This has lead to various projects including ongoing work on a mission-critical planning and publishing system, serving more than 300 users at several Swiss government offices, and recently a robust Linux-based interactive movie theatre system used for the exhibition "L'Histoire c'est moi" which is now touring Switzerland. Mentoring and leading teams using lightweight project tools is another big part of Bertrand's work.

Open-Source software has played an important part in Bertrand's activities since 1997, including launching the "jfor" project to develop an Open-Source XML to RTF converter and being a committer on the Apache Cocoon and FOP projects since 2002. Bertrand was elected as an Apache Software Foundation member in May 2004.