Editing Apache Cocoon (section)

===Generators===
Generators create a [[stream (computing)|stream]] of data for further processing. This stream can be generated from an existing XML document or there are generators that can create XML from scratch to represent something on the server, such as a directory structure or image data.

====XSP====
One type of generator is an XML Server Page ('''XSP'''), an XML document containing tag-based directives that specify how to generate dynamic content at request time. Upon Cocoon processing, these directives are replaced by generated content so that the resulting, augmented XML document can be subject to further processing (typically an XSLT transformation). XSPs are transformed into Cocoon producers, typically as Java classes, though any scripting language for which a Java-based processor exists could also be used.

Directives can be either built-in ("XSP") or user-defined processing tags, both of which are defined in ''logic sheets''.  Tags are defined using XSLT templates that describe how the tags (represented as XML nodes) are transformed into other XML nodes or into procedural code such as Java. The tags are used to embed procedural logic, substitute expressions, retrieve information from the webserver environment, and other operations.

Note that XSP is deprecated in recent releases of Cocoon.{{Citation needed|date=May 2022}}