The content management systems Apache Lenya and Daisy have been created on top of the framework.

Matchers are used to match user requests such as URLs or cookies against wildcard or regular expression patterns.

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.

The tags are used to embed procedural logic, substitute expressions, retrieve information from the webserver environment, and other operations.

A serializer turns an XML event stream into a sequence of bytes (such as HTML) that can be returned to the client.

Some serializers allow you to send the data in many different formats including HTML, XHTML, PDF, RTF, SVG, WML and plain text, for example.

Actions are Java classes that execute some business logic or manage new content production.