"A path through the jungle of Cocoon". To beginners, Cocoon's rich toolset is sometimes perceived as a scary jungle of functionality. Where to start? What to learn? Will I make it? Will it be worth it? Focusing on the essential components and concepts of Cocoon, this talk helps you answer those questions, and provides a roadmap to shorten the trip and make it as enjoyable as possible. We start with an overview of an actual web application built on Cocoon, and show how understanding a handful of essential concepts and components (Pipelines, Flow, Forms, basic Avalon concepts) is sufficient to start building powerful applications. There's a catch, however: as with any complex framework, this is only true if the developer or team have the right skillset and mindset. To help people evaluate their (or their team's) potential with Cocoon, we describe the skills needed to work with it at various levels (multi-channel publishing, database access, java business logic programming, debugging, etc.), and describe the kind of "know a little about many things" mindset that helps so much in getting started or going forward with Cocoon.

Biografie:

Independent since 1989, Bertrand Delacrétaz is a software architect, programmer and teacher based in Switzerland. Contracted as lead architect and programmer for two major projects of the Swiss Parliament's IT department in 1997 ("CuriaVista") and 1999 ("verbalix"), Bertrand aims to build Software That Works - pragmatic systems based on the Unix philosophy of small, testable components connected by clean interfaces. This has lead to various projects including ongoing work on a mission-critical planning and publishing system, serving more than 300 users at several Swiss government offices, a robust Linux-based interactive movie theatre system used nationwide for a mobile exhibition, and recently a Cocoon-based multimedia CMS for the Swiss Television's nouvo.ch website. Mentoring and leading teams using lightweight project tools is another big part of Bertrand's work. Bertrand is a committer on the Cocoon project since 2002, and a member of the Apache Software Foundation since 2004.