Go to http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/index.html for an introduction to Cocoon and a link to the download page. You will see that a number of mysterious entities are mentioned: Xerces, Xalan, FOP, Xang, SOAP. These are all subsidiary packages that are used to make up Cocoon. What you need of them is included with the Cocoon download and is guaranteed to work, even though they may not be the latest releases. This makes the file rather large, but saves problems with inconsistent versions.
If you are running Apache on a platform where support for JDK 1.2 is either missing or difficult, you may still find it useful to run an older version of Cocoon. The following section documents Cocoon 1.8 installation with JServ, as well as the more recent Cocoon 2.0.3, which uses Tomcat. Both sources and binary versions are available for both multiple platforms.