The Micro-Cocoon branch here in whiteboard has the goal to free Cocoon from 
any dependencies on Avalon and Excalibur and to make it useable as library 
that provides XML pipelines and sitemaps.

PREREQUISITES
-------------
You need a 1.5.x or higher.
Maven 2 must be installed (at least 2.0.6).

For the time being, following SNAPSHOT dependencies from Cocoon trunk are required:

 - cocoon-servlet-service-impl
   (Won't be needed as soon as the final release is available.)
 - cocoon-spring-configurator
   (Won't be needed as soon as the final release is available.)
 - cocoon-it-fw
   (Will be copied over to and upgraded to JUnit 4.4.)