Geoff makes a couple blanket statements in his post about how the Java world doesn’t understand CFMX. I don’t agree with a couple of them:

· ColdFusion remains the only answer to making Java accessible to a mass of non comp-sci web developers — I don’t have a computer science degree, neither do 3 of the other 4 developers at Mindseye (all of whom have written Java applications and all of who have spoken at DevCon) and I’ve created a couple sites using Java & JSP technology so to say that non comp-sci web developers can’t understand Java is patently incorrect. I think it also bears mentioning that Java is considered by some to be a language for the masses:

“The advantages of Java is that it easily serves as a lingua franca – everyone can read a Java program and understand what is going on…“,

· …most Java developers fail to see where CFMX fits into their world of programming… — Why should they care? There are a number of other scripting languages that work with Java, PHP being one of them. Java developers have enough to worry about… they’re too busy choosing between web frameworks (struts, tapestry, webwork2), persistence models (obj, castor, jdo..) and templating mechanisms (velocity, cocoon..). It’s commonly mentioned/demonstrated that ColdFusion is easy by showing how few lines it takes to query a database, but has anyone ever asked an enterprise Java developer how many queries they put into a JSP? .

With that said, I think that Geoff has the right attitude, starting a “.. post-positive campaign highlighting CFMX/Java symbiosis” is a great starting point. Go one step further though. Build a J2EE application, learn Struts, use OJB. Geoff claims that J2EE people don’t understand CFMX. How well do CFMX people understand J2EE?

I mentioned yesterday that Sam posted some great code that lets you upload files to ColdFusion without using CFFILE. His code can be shortened considerably with the use of the init() method:

<cfscript>
fileAsString = “”;
fileReader = createObject(“java”, “java.io.FileReader”);
fileReader.init(form.upFile);
bufferedReader = createObject(“java”, “java.io.BufferedReader”);
bufferedReader.init(fileReader);
try {
   do {
      fileAsString = bufferedReader.readLine();
      processLine(fileAsString);
   } while (true);
} catch (coldfusion.runtime.UndefinedVariableException e) {
// this indicates end of file, ok to ignore error
}
</cfscript>

Basically, you use the CreateObject() function to get a Java object. At that point, you can call static methods on the object or you can use the init() method to call the constructor of the Java object, which I’ve done above, ie:

// get a FileReader object
fileReader = createObject(“java”, “java.io.FileReader”);
// call the FileReader object constructor
fileReader.init(form.upFile);

If you’re curious about this kind of stuff, you should check out the article on Java, ColdFusion MX and Lucene integration I wrote for the July issue of ColdFusion Developer’s Journal, due to hit the stands anytime now.