Warning - this post involves a lot of gushing.
My company's first Cocoon based web application is live in production now =) It is an internal application so I cannot point you to it though =/
I don't think I can stress enough how much anyone out there who hasn't taken the time to look at Cocoon for their Java web apps needs to, RIGHT NOW. Once you grok how it works (and yes, it is a different paradigm than almost anything else in common use) productivity goes up by leaps and bounds over action-oriented frameworks. I am a convert.
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Was, Moved Away
I was a convert for some time; it is definitely very clean. There was a lot of appeal having so much friggin control over the end result (a PDF was as easy to render as an HTML page); unfortunately, some of the control flow stuff was still too green for me, and the fact it was based of ol'clunky avalon really dissuaded me after a time. I think it really depends on what you're doing with the application too; cocoon is a great presentation management layer, but the action/generator/transformer/serializer paradigm can cause problems too. I liked cocoon, and still refer people to it as a good experience in paradigm shifts; but, at the same time, I think they need a Cocoon 3 ;).
Re: Was, Moved Away
I was in the same boat you were for a long time. What I learned at ApacheCon in November got me looking at it again though -- and you see the result =) It isn't perfect, but it is the best all around tool I have yet found. I don't use, nor do i intend to use, the huge array of silly features (PDF generation being one) -- I just use FlowScript, Woody, JXTemplateGenerator, and an XSLT.
Congrats! I hope to some day have a job where I can actually use Cocoon. Until then, I just gotta manage... The nice thing about Cocoon is that you can strip out the stuff you don't want. If you don't want FOP, you don't have to add the components. It will get even better in 2.2 with Real Blocks(c)(r)(tm).
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