Cant convert boolean to java.lang.Boolean - HUH?

Question

I'm fairly new to Java, but I'm pretty sure this should work.
Can someone tell me why I'm getting these compiler errors:
wehServlet.java:72: Incompatible type for if. Can't convert java.lang.Boolean to boolean.
if (checkoutSpecificFile(req,res,busId,tempDir)) {
^
wehServlet.java:123: Incompatible type for return. Can't convert boolean to java.lang.Boolean.
return true;
Here's the basic code:
import java.io.*;
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import java.util.*;
public class wehServlet extends HttpServlet {
private void someThing (HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res)
throws ServletException, IOException {
if(tryThis()) {
<do something>
} else {
<do something else>
private Boolean tryThis() {
return false;
Why can't I do this?
How do I fix it?
I tried
if(tryThis().booleanValue())....
and I get this compile error:
Incompatible type for return. Can't convert boolean to java.lang.Boolean
Now what do I do?

Answer 1

There's a lot of confusion caused by these "Wrapper" objects, not just Boolean but Integer, Long etc.
The basic ("primitive") types are lower case names, boolean, int, long etc..
The related items with capital letters are "wrapper" objects. The are used in a context where you basically want to store a single value but must do so as an Object, for example in aggregate objects like Map or List.
You should avoid these unless there's a specific reason to use them.
You can convert between boolean and Boolean, int and Integer etc. but it has to be done explicitly. As far as Java is concerned they're entirely different kind of thing. To java the Boolean class is just another kind of Object, it has no special syntactic significance.
boolean b;
Boolean bo;
b = bo.booleanValue();  // covert from Boolean object to boolean primitive
bo = new Boolean(b); // convert primitive to Object
if(bo.booleanValue()) {  // test Boolean objed