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.