Ben Forta On Java Methods In ColdFusion
Posted August 28, 2006 at 9:45 AM
Ben Forta posted a blog entry about Java properties last week and I took the opportunity to ask him about how safe it was to use the Java methods that underlie the world of ColdFusion. If you have been following my blog, you know that I am loving the Java stuff that is accessible from the ColdFusion application layer. I want to start using more of it in my applications, but I don't want to use stuff that will explode in the next version of ColdFusion.
So I asked Ben Forta how safe it was to use the underlying Java methods, and this is what he had to say:
Ben, those are two different questions. Core Java stuff is not going away, we have no plans on rebuilding CF in something other than Java, so leveraging underlying Java is perfectly safe (and highly reccommended). As for CF internals that are written in Java, well, if they are undocumented then they are not supported and may indeed change or evolve - and service factory definitely falls into that category.
From this, I gathered that things like CreateObject( "java", "java.lang.String" ) are definitely definitely safe as that is part of Core Java. However, when I asked him about the information that is available via the GetMetaData() method, this is what he had to say:
Ben, I guess that would depend on the object. But I think you're safe with that one.
I then asked him about calling Java string methods directly from a ColdFusion variable, as in:
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- <cfset strText = "ColdFusion rocks it hardcore!" />
-
- <!--- Call the String::ReplaceAll() method. --->
- #strText.ReplaceAll( "hardcore", "very hardcore" )#
... Ben Forta said:
Ben, simple CF variables are in fact Java strings, so you can safely use any String class methods on them. FYI, you can always look at #var.getClass().getName()# to see what the underlying class behind a ColdFusion variable is.
And when I asked about things like the ColdFusion Query object's IsFirst(), IsLast(), RemoveRows(), Ben stated:
Those internal query object methods are how CF works its magic (how a cfoutput over a query works, for example). I guess those could change, but I highly doubt that would happen.
From all this, it seems that calling Java methods from a ColdFusion object is fairly acceptable. It's not set in stone, but things like the String object methods seem to be very definite. This is waaaay cool. Thanks Ben!
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