ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer suggests that Apache Cocoon by itself doesn’t really represent a Web Services or XML framework, though he does think it shares some of the most important aspects of service-oriented architectures or SOAs (define).

“In particular, Cocoon uses ‘component pipelines’, in which each component on the pipeline specializes in a particular operation. This makes it possible to compose together components into pipelines without any required programming. This is very similar to one of the fundamental tenets of SOA – namely, coarse granularity,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com. “In addition, the use of XML and the ‘separation of concerns’ guiding principle mirrors the ‘loose coupling’ tenet of SOAs — namely the ability to independently create and control Service consumers and producers.”

Schmelzer argues that Cocoon is not intended to be used as a general purpose SOA, rather the separation of concerns is restricted to Web content development and server-based integration.

“While this is certainly close to the direction that companies like IBM and BEA are headed with their app server environments, Cocoon requires users to implement many of the critical pieces required to realize SOA in the context of reusable integration assets that are event-driven and business process-controlled,” he said.

Read more at: InternetNews