Java And Coldfusion Data Type Conversions - MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX Develop Manual

In this example, the constructor takes four arguments: the first two are strings, the third is a float,
and the fourth is an integer.

Java and ColdFusion data type conversions

ColdFusion does not use explicit types for variables, while Java is strongly typed. However,
ColdFusion data does use a number of underlying types to represent data.
Under most situations, when the method names are not ambiguous, ColdFusion can determine
the data types that are required by a Java object, and often it can convert ColdFusion data to the
required types. For example, ColdFusion text strings are implicitly converted to the Java String
type. Similarly, if a Java object contains a doIt method that expects a parameter of type int, and
CFML is issuing a doIt call with a CFML variable x that contains an integer value, ColdFusion
converts the variable x to Java int type. However, ambiguous situations can result from Java
method overloading, where a class has multiple implementations of the same method that differ
only in their parameter types.
The following sections describe how ColdFusion handles the unambiguous situations, and how it
provides you with the tools to handle ambiguous ones.
Default data type conversion
Whenever possible, ColdFusion automatically matches Java types to ColdFusion types.
The following table lists how ColdFusion converts ColdFusion data values to Java data types
when passing arguments. The left column represents the underlying ColdFusion representation of
its data. The right column indicates the Java data types into which ColdFusion can automatically
convert the data:
CFML
Integer
Real number
Boolean
Date-time
String, including lists
Array
Structure
Query object
Java
short, int, long (short and int might result in a loss of precision).
float double (float might result in a loss of precision.
boolean
java.util.Date
String
short, int, long, float, double, java.util.Date, when a CFML string represents
a number or date.
boolean, for strings with the value Yes, No, True, and False (case-
insensitive).
java.util.Vector (ColdFusion Arrays are internally represented using an
instance of a java.util.Vector object.)
ColdFusion can also map a CFML array to any of the following when the
CFML array contains consistent data of a type that can be converted to
the Java array's data type: byte[], char[], boolean[], int[], long[], float[],
double[], String[], or Object[]. When a CFML array contains data of
different of types, the conversion to a simple array type might fail.
java.util.Map
java.util.Map
Using Java objects 751