CMS, Seperation of concerns - the Cocoon style

Hi there, I was thinking about this a lot today and was wondering if there are any people here on this list that have experimented with this: I hope you know what Cocoon does. If I can just sum up what I am concerned about: * Separation of concerns (i.e. Design, Content and Logic are COMPLETELY separate entities) * Pipelining xml to create out of one content file many other, semantically different files (like xhtml, pdf, wml .) * To use such a system as a generic template system, say for Conferences What is was now wondering about is, what would be the best practice here. I have read a little up on the use of PHP in combination with Cocoon 2, and it looks like that there are a few ways of doing this. Question: the reason why I went the PHP and not the XSP way was because of the huge complexity and slowness of Cocoon (jsp, xsp, servlets) compared to PHP. So now the combination of the two still does not sound feasible, or does it not matter much? The fact still remains that xml transformations nibble CPU time. Then there is also Java involved. :-/ A second option would be to write my own PHP 5 driven XML transformers/template engine (I would not dare to say that I could do so!). I know that PHP 5 has got a hugely improved XML and DOM interface. And one could possibly combine this with PEAR classes and Smarty (or something similar). Then there are things like . err, forgot the name, but there is an open source project out there that emulates what Cocoon does (separation of concerns and pipelining), by using only PHP. I am quite keen on getting some sort of backbone going where I can create, manipulate pdf's and even stuff like Word files and rtfs. I am still mesmerized by the whole XML idea. Some people talk about it having failed the web . hmmm, not sure of that. Maybe it's just not been tried enough? So, any inputs on that? I would not mind going the java route, just prefer rapid development over: asant - asant deploy - asant undeploy - asant clean .. And so on . Thanks, Thomas