Depending on who you ask, you might get different answers: Cocoon 2 has become a rather big project, or more precisely a rather big collection of modular components, and as such means different things to different people.

Today, more than 40 blocks are available to acquire, process and publish XML data, and to build interactive applications based on XML and java technologies. Cocoon does not contain millions of lines of codes, but rather reuses a lot of Open-Source tools and libraries, combining them in a very modular way.

In the beginning, Cocoon was only a web publishing framework, meant to convert different document types to HTML, PDF and similar formats for publishing.

Today, and especially with the Cocoon Forms and Flow components that we're going to discuss, Cocoon is becoming a full-blown web applications framework, covering a large set of use cases and targeting different styles of developers.

By covering the mainstream aspects of Cocoon as it stands at the beginning of 2004, this supersonic tour will help you get a feel of what Cocoon is about, and help you find your way in this big collection of components.