Carsten Ziegeler has announced the availability of the first beta release of a completely rewritten, and long-awaited, Cocoon version 2.0.

The prospect of Cocoon 2.0 has been in the air for quite some time. The idea was already well established two years ago. Stefano Mazzocchi wrote in November 99, only 10 months after the launch of Cocoon:

Cocoon2 branch will be created next week on the cocoon new CVS. This branch will contain the new interfaces Pier and I have been working on for a couple of weeks. No code is working, but the architecture is there.

Described as a "separate codebase to incorporate Cocoon 1 learnings", the core characteristics of this Cocoon 2, such a long time in the making, are:

• Designed for execution speed/memory efficiency and scalability to process very large documents by switching processing model from DOM to SAX.
• Centralizes the management functions by allowing processing pipeline specification in a sitemap (an XML file), replacing the embedded processing instruction model.
• Better support for pre-compilation, pre-generation and caching for better performance.

And since "we did a beta 1 release and all of us survived...", Carsten Ziegeler proposed to schedule a beta 2 for mid July, and Giacomo Pati suggested an integration of SOAP:

I have still the proposal and samples from Michael Homeijer concerning C2 act as a SOAP client and server which is something that is really interesting to me.

The Cocoon 2 developers appear to be setting an ambitious schedule!

Other stories:

• Mazzocchi takes a break from Cocoon
• Trapped in our Cocoon?
• Cocoon 1.7 released