Components and Beans

Cocoon is developed by in components. These components are assembled to build the web framework and your application. While older versions of Cocoon used the Excalibur Component Container from the Avalon project, the later versions are now using Spring as the container. Currently Cocoon is using Spring 2.0.

To provide compatibility with older Cocoon versions, the Spring container has been enhanced to understand the Avalon configuration files and to manage Avalon based components.

Regardless if you're directly using Spring beans or Avalon components, they all share the same component container. This enables Spring beans to use Avalon components and vice versa transparently.