I am taking an XML/XSLT class and in order to spare myself the need to share the machine with other XSLT newbies such as me, exhausting its resources to death, I decided to go ahead and install Cocoon.

It appears the good folks at Apache decided that providing binary builds is not a great idea so it was me getting the source and building it using the included build.bat (or build.sh) files. I downloaded to considerable file (44-46 MB) and ran the script. To my disappointment, I failed to get anything created as the webapp that Cocoon can become.

I then tried creating the webapp using the
build webapp
instruction that is reported around the Internet.

I then received the ever so cryptic
%COCOON_HOME%\src\blocks\stx\java not found

I failed to find any answers at the time (although I did now) and that was very frustrating.

It appears that the missing folder – blocks\stx\java – is an empty folder. Some decompression programs, merrilly omit expanding the directory if there is nothing there and so I was, totally puzzled. So as the link above suggests, just create a java folder and the problem is solved….