How do you read the Railo documentation?

Question

I was reading Ben Nadel's post about the isnull function and my initial thought was "wait: there's an isnull function in ColdFusion? I didn't know that! I wonder if there's one in Railo?" So I typed:

railo isnull

into google and this was the first link. In fact, a lot of my Railo searches have been to similar pages, so apparently this is something that I'm supposed to be able to read and understand. Here's my question:

Q: How do you read the Railo documentation?

I'm used to seeing words written out in sentence format like Ben's post. I mean: I can see that a lot of work went into this page, so I should try to squeeze some kind of meaning out of it... When I see for example:

Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object equals, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait

Does that mean anything to an applications programmer like myself, or is that a kind of internal documentation? I followed the link to the actual source code, but that's almost too much information.

Maybe I've identified a need.

Answer 1

You read the Railo Javadoc API the same way you read any Javadoc API.
_{(Though as you note this is more internal documentation and most CFML developers wont need to.)}

If you want Railo's CFML documentation for isNull, you visit railodocs.org/isNull instead.

I don't know why Google isn't capable of finding the correct pages. :/

For the benefit of Google I'll also throw in these other links to the isNull documentation: http://railodocs.org/function/isnull?version=current and http://railodocs.org/index.cfm/function/isnull/version/current - they all display the same content (which may be a factor in why they're not ranked properly), so if someone reminds me later I'll bug Mark about getting the URLs canonicalised.

Answer 2

Railo does have isNull()

• It works on variables that are not strings
• It works on strings

In my experience, Railo 4.2 more or less supports CFML at the same level as ColdFusion 10. It is always useful to test. I agree that as of early 2014, Railo's documentation is lacking a certain clarity.