I currently am running both the Passthru Servlet and Cocoon 2.0.4 under Tomcat 4.1.12 on a RH Linux 7.2 box. The Passthru Servlet is configured to use Saxon 6.5.2 (in its own WEB-INF/lib directory) and works fine.

Tomcat was initially configured to use xalan and xerces by default (in $TOMCAT_HOME/common/lib) , but whenever we invoked the Passthru servlet, our Cocoon servlets suddenly decided they needed saxon available to parse xml. We tried taking care of the issue by copying the saxon.jar file into
$TOMCAT_HOME/common/lib, which almost solved the problem. A search engine which makes use of Cocoon’s XSP apparently is only compatible with xalan, though, not saxon.

Has anyone successfully used the passthru servlet with xalan, and if so, what do I need to do to switch?

It’s always difficult to help with configuration problems when you’re not hands-on. There certainly shouldn’t be a problem getting the Passthru servlet to use Xalan by making the appropriate change to the init parameters in the web.xml file. But in fact you shouldn’t need to: it should be quite possible to use Saxon in the Passthru servlet even when Cocoon is using Xalan. The question to ask is, why is Cocoon asking to load Saxon? I think you need to look at what configuration files (or environment variables) Cocoon is using, which ought to be quite independent of Passthru.

Michael Kay