Java™ for ColdFusion® Developers

5.1. Objects

ColdFusion 5 introduced user-defined functions, which allowed us to write functions much as we would in JavaScript. In the Java programming language, functions are often referred to as methods. One way of making a distinction between them is that a function can be declared (as in ColdFusion) in a vacuum of sorts—it needn't always refer to any other thing or be part of any other thing (such as an object or a class). ColdFusion allows us to write user-defined functions that stand on their own, and the language defines many such functions.

Specific objects (or classes) define specific methods, and you can only use them when you have access to them. When you call a static method like Integer.parseInt(), you are not using an instance ...