Welcome to Paloose

Paloose is a simplified version of the Cocoon Web engine using PHP. It resulted from scratching a long standing personal itch: that there are very few ISPs who will support Java/Tomcat for web sites, other than as a very expensive "professional" addition. Almost all will support PHP of some variety, so I decided to write my version of a simple, cut-down Cocoon in PHP. Currently the latest version of Paloose requires PHP-8 which should not be a problem as most ISPs support this version. I wanted to use XML on my personal sites but could not use Cocoon because of the expense. I have been using Paloose for some time now and have always found it a good substitute for Cocoon in all but the most complex sites. Paloose may also encourage others to start using XML and XSL without having to use extra bits such as Tomcat, Jetty or a full Cocoon installation.

Please note that the technology underlying Paloose does not make it suitable for very large sites. If you need performance (see a discussion of performance issues here) then upgrade to Cocoon — the extra expense of an updated server account will probably be unnoticeable in the overall cost of a large site anyway. However, having the ability to try out XML and XSL ideas in a PHP environment with a subset of Cocoon is very useful.

Although Paloose is free software (see Licence here) I would appreciate an EMAIL (hsfr@hsfr.org.uk) from anyone who downloads it — especially those who actually use it. Comments are welcome, good or bad.