I've been maintaining a complex Cocoon application for a couple of years now. Unfortunately, as the code gets older, it requires more and more time for maintenance unless you keep it clean and neat from the beginning. Finally I've found time to refactor the project gradually and I'll try to keep it this way. In this article I'm going to review the steps I've taken to improve the code and build quality. Remove duplicated resources I've started with removing duplicated and unused resources (mostly images and icons). Many of them were duplicated across the application in several Cocoon blocks. So I had to keep common resources in a single shared block and modify references from other blocks accordingly. For this I've added the following sitemap rule into all blocks: <map:match pattern="shared/resource/external/**"> <map:read src="servlet:shared:/resource/external/{1}"/> </map:match> This single improvement decre...