This site is built using Apache Forrest technology. Forrest is created as a means to generate the documentation for all the Apache projects. It's based on XML as a data container, XSLT as the data transformer and Apache Cocoon is used as the logic. Cocoon provides a total Separation of Concerns (SoC). It gives the possibility to separate the content, the presentation and the logic of a web application entirely.
In practice you start out with a download of Forrest and build it, a pretty easy process if you have a Java Development Kit installed. Building is just a matter of typing build in the directory where Forrest is unpacked. After the build process you get some information on the screen on setting an environment variable, so that the Forrest commands are available throughout the computer. Once that is done you create a new directory and go to it. There you type forrest seed and a sample site will be created. Now you can start tweaking the default site to get what you want. If you use the default skin (the template that contains the look and feel of the site) you can have a site running in a few hours.
The output of the site can be either static HTML or a Java webapp. In practice this mean you either enter forrest or forrest war. The latter will create a war file for you to deploy where as the first one will generate a FULL STATIC website in HTML. Just upload the generated HTML and you are done.
Forrest also provides an automated system to capture the data, generate the static site and upload it. This engine is called forrestbot. It works very well in Unix versions. It's actually being used for the Forrest site itself. The windows version is a bit buggy and needs to be updated.
I thoroughly recommend Forrest and Cocoon for web application building. It has an incredibly versatile and productive. Moreover, due to the use of Java, it's platform independant.
