Why learn Java if you know ColdFusion?

[solaced]

ColdFusion is awesome for my work. I can make anything I want with it and seeing as 99% of my work is making web applications, I haven't needed to look elsewhere.

I was just wondering why anyone would need to learn Java, if you already know ColdFusion... I understand that ColdFusion runs on Java, but is there anything special I could do with Java that is not possible in ColdFusion for use in websites?

It intrigues me because I have to cover the work of an ASP.NET developer, and when I was looking at his C# code (which looked very similar to Java) it made me cry to think people make websites in this way. Compared to ColdFusion it looks archaic but then I remember that CF works with Java so I thought about looking into learning Java. But is there any advantage to me doing this?

[Steve Sommers]

I try to avoid Java programming as much as possible but I have found instances where native Java has it's place, especially in CPU intensive pieces of a large high volume application. Just remember while CF is very optimized and runs very fast, it is still a scripting language and runs at a p-code level at best -- heavy parsing and moving of data or number crunching is not it's forte.

[solaced]

Thanks for that. So if I'm working on a high-transaction application then it might be better to do the legwork backend processing with Java rather than CF.

[Steve Sommers]

Correct, but it does depend on the app. I have written some high volume apps in CF only and not had an issue. But my primary work is with developing and maintaining a payment gateway and due to the nature of the application there are a few non-native CF components (both Java and Delphi). The beauty of CF is it's ability to seamlessly mix if you have to. But again, I prefer to keep non-CF dependancies to a minimum.

[p_sim]

You don't need to learn Java programming, but you should learn how to take advantages of Java classes to leverage ColdFusion power. For example, Java's cryptography library gives more variety options compared to ColdFusion's.