This page contains descriptions of the various blocks and what they do/provide.
Eventually they may be broken out into separate pages but let's keep them here for now.
Block dependencies are listed in blocks.properties as well, please update or inform the dev mailing list if you find new dependencies.
apples
Apples is a new flow implementation for Cocoon that allows you to write your deciding flow components (business logic) in pure OO Java.
asciiart
Provides a generator for reading ASCII art files and rendering them into images.
authentication-fw
Components for the authentication framework. Provides LoginAction, LogoutAction, ProtectedAction, ConfigurationGenerator. Include samples.
Requires: session-fw block.
axis
Provides the AxisRPCReader, which accepts a SOAP request. Allows you to serve SOAP requests from your Cocoon application.
Batik
Allow rendering SVG images to JPEG and PNG using Batik library. Include SVGSerializer, FragmentExtractorGenerator and FragmentExtractorTransformer. Includes samples. Required-By: fop block
BeanScriptingFramework
_ The Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) incorporate scripting into Cocoon. Using BSF, an application can use scripting, and become scriptable, against any BSF-supported language. When BSF supports additional languages, the application will automatically support the additional languages. Provides ScriptAction and ScriptGenerator. Include the required bsf libraries._
chaperon
Provides TextGenerator and the required Chaperon libs for the creation of XML from a structured plaintext (Grammars). See also Chaperon @ SF
cron
Provides a cron scheduler. Helps to run some task at defined intervals of time. Eg: every day at 4:00 a.m. run maintenance of the database
Required-By: scratchpad block
databases
Provides various database-related actions and transformers, ESQL and other database-related logicsheets, as well as various utility classes. You probably want this if you desire any sort of database connectivity.
deli
_Provides deli and rdffilter libs, DeliTransformer, as well as the custom Deli components that Cocoon needs.
For more information, see the Deli documentation._
eventcache
Event-based cache invalidation, where the events are external to Cocoon, such as a database update. See the samples for more info.
FOP
FOP reads an XSL-FO document and turns it into a PDF, PS or PCL format document using FOPSerializer. Include libraries and docs. Include FOP libraries, components and samples.
Requires: Batik block
hsqldb
Add support for HSQL Database Engine a 100% Java Relational Database.
html
Provides the html file generator which extract xhtml sax events from any html file. It is based on jtidy.
itext
You need iText if you don't want to use the FOP block to generate PDF.
jfor
Allows you to serialize data as RTF using FO.
jsp
Provides the JSPGenerator, JSPReader, utility components. Include samples.
jxforms
Provides a form framework based on xform. Include samples.
linkrewriter
Provides the LinkRewriterTansformer and the VariableRewriterTransformer. These allow you to change links in your pages, for somethin as simple as adding a request parameter to every URL, or something more complicated as changing links to point elsewhere. See the samples and the Javadocs for the components for more information.
linotype
Linotype is a robust weblogging tool written on top of Cocoon. Check out the samples for more info.
lucene
Provides the components needed to add full text search to your site, including the LuceneIndexTransformer. See also the Lucene website
Functionality for sending mail using the SendmailAction, a Sendmail Logicsheet for your XSPs, and an experimental IMAPGenerator. There is also a WebMail application included in the samples for this block.
MIDI
The MIDI block provides components to generate XMidi (an XML representation of MIDI) from a MIDI file, and to serialize XMidi back to a MIDI file. There are also simple stylesheets for transposition and inversion.
naming
Provides the LDAPTransformer, for LDAP access. "Naming" comes from the N in JNDI.
OJB Block
Provides components to use Apache OJB.
petstore
The Cocoon flowscript version of the J2EE PetStore.
php
Provides the PHPGenerator. This block is considered deprecated in the 2.1.x branch of Cocoon and is removed in 2.2-dev. The servlet that is distributed with PHP never worked correctly.
poi
Provides a HSSF serializer that produce MS Excel spreadsheet format output. The input format must be the one used by Gnumeric .
portal
portal-fw
Provides the components which compose the framework which allows you to build a portal with Cocoon. Deprecated.
precept
Form processing. Check the README file included with this block for more information.
profiler
Provides the ProfilerGenerator, which allows you to debug and profile your pipelines.
proxy
Provides some generators which proxy requests to remote HTTP servers, including the HttpProxyGenerator and the WebServiceProxyGenerator.
python
Enables to use the Python language in XSP pages
qdox
Parse JavaDocs using QDox.
samples
Add the samples of the Cocoon distribution.
scratchpad
new components or core functions under experimental development.
Requires: cron block
session-fw
Provides the components to manage (create, modify, delete) sessions in xml with the Session Transformer.
Required-By: authentication-fw block
slide
Jakarta Slide integration.
slop
*S*imple 'L*ine* O*riented* P_'arser. Allows you to parse text files using the SlopGenerator._
stx
Allows you to use STX for transforming your documents.
swf
Provides the SWFGenerator and SWFSerializer for the creation and manipulation of Flash animations using Cocoon. Includes the required Spark library.
taglib
velocity
_ This is a generator that uses the velocity template engine to feed velocity documents into the Cocoon pipeline. See Velocity._
web3
Enables Cocoon to comunicate with SAP R/3(TM). Further information can be found in the documentation.
webdav
Provides interconnectivity for WebDav. Allows you to use WebDav sources and also provides the DASLTransformer. Check out the samples for more info.
Woody
Provides a form framework. Include samples. Deprecated.
xmldb
Provides infrastructure for connecting to XML Databases using a number of methods, including the XMLDBGenerator, XMLDBCollectionGenerator, DbXMLAuthenticatorAction, and the XMLDBTransformer.
xmlform
Form processing. Deprecated.
A picture of cocoon blocks with a lot of pointers for dependencies blocks-218.ppt