The Apache Cocoon Project have made available a release candidate version of Cocoon 2, a complete rewrite of the Cocoon XML publishing framework.

Cocoon 2's improvements on the successful, but slow, original Cocoon, include:

• Incremental operation: data is pipelined through the various stages of transformation
• Lower memory consumption: due to incremental operation
• Better scalability
• More optimizable code model: method-driven operation allows easier identification of "hotspots."
• Reduced need for garbage collection

More detail and downloads are available from the Apache Cocoon 2 web site.