I live in Brooklyn, NY but am often in Boston. I'm an XML dork and information architect with a lot of interest in the Semantic Web.
I've been publishing http://ftrain.com using a hacked-together XSLT framework for several years, relying mostly static generation of content, and giving up in frustration on integrating XML content with tools like PHP/Perl, and even Python.
So now I'm going to try, over the next year, to implement Ftrain.com in Cocoon - that is, starting with the 1000 or so pages in a giant XML tree, convert to individual pages which are rich in metadata, and display those in a variety of formats, responsive to user preference (split pages/not, user-selected CSS, user annotations). I prototyped a bunch of these features in PHP, so now it's time to do it something a little more robust. Hence Java, which I'm learning.
I've got the Cocoon environment on my laptop and am going to order a server, I hope, in the next month or two where I can have a live production system. Wish me luck!