Comment Tomcat + FOP is all you need (Score 2, Insightful) 64
since you say all your developers all "know java well" the choice is already made for you. Go with Tomcat as your servlet engine (unless you are already a J2EE shop with jboss/websphere/weblogic...
instead of trying to wrangle with cocoon or cocoon2, (cocoon1 seems faster imho) i'd just go ahead and use the XSL:FO utilities from apache known as FOP. we're using FOP right now to deliver reports in PDF and print them directly from the PCL it can generate. Having the reports as XML makes sense since we can tell our SQL server to output XML and all we have to do is tell FOP to render it with appropriate XSL. Rendering HTML is simple also - we just transform it on the fly with xalan/xerces.
good luck!
instead of trying to wrangle with cocoon or cocoon2, (cocoon1 seems faster imho) i'd just go ahead and use the XSL:FO utilities from apache known as FOP. we're using FOP right now to deliver reports in PDF and print them directly from the PCL it can generate. Having the reports as XML makes sense since we can tell our SQL server to output XML and all we have to do is tell FOP to render it with appropriate XSL. Rendering HTML is simple also - we just transform it on the fly with xalan/xerces.
good luck!
