Summary

One of the coolest additions to ColdFusion MX is the CFTRACE tag. I can think of many instances in the past where having this functionality built in to the ColdFusion Server would have saved a lot of grief when trying to track down a problematic piece of code.

Although we've gone over a simple example of how you can harness the power of this tag to examine the process flow of your applications, we've by no means covered everything that you can do with this tag. Hopefully, however, as you move forward with debugging the applications you develop, you'll be encouraged to play around with ways in which you can use the built-in debugging tools of the ColdFusion engine to speed up your development time and make you a better overall programmer.

You can avoid spending too much time debugging applications by developing with accepted best practices in mind. Interestingly enough, that's what we're about to cover in Chapter 15, "CFML Coding: Best Practices," so read on!