Apache Forrest – Document Generation

I have been working on document generation utility and decided to explore what options are already available. The features I was looking into the framework were
1. Less learning curve
2. Extendable
3. Various Output Formats
4. Pluggable with Java
5. Open Source and Freeware
6. Should have popular community

While came across various options, I stumbled upon an interesting project from Apache – Apache Forrest. It was an interesting project to get started because of following reasons
1. Easy to get started (You can build sample site within 10 mins)
2. Based on popular framework – Apache Cocoon (One of the best framework for true component based architecture)
3. Extendable – Supports development of new plugins for Input/Output formats
4. Supported by Apache (Open Source, Freeware, Good documentation blah blah) 🙂
5. Theme/Skinning support
6. Cocoon being underlying framework it supports numerous output formats (though officially only HTML and PDF is supported.)