Summary

This chapter covered a lot of ground, including how to create and invoke CFCs, various methods of passing information to CFCs, and how to get information back. We also looked at error trapping, securing your CFCs, inheritance, introspection, and packaging your CFCs for ease of deployment and encapsulation.

There is a lot to learn here; and although we touched on a huge amount of the functionality of CFCs, there is more to the topic than we can cover in one chapter. No matter if you are new to ColdFusion or are a long-term ColdFusion developer, you should carefully think about how CFCs can change the way you develop ColdFusion applications as a team or as an individual. If you do, you will soon start to see new possibilities for development that were never available to you before. CFCs give you an unprecedented amount of power over and flexibility in your development process while allowing you to expose only the functionality you desire to users, developers, and designers. One of the topics not covered here is CFCs and web services functionality. In Chapter 21, "Web Services and ColdFusion," we will explore this area of CFC functionality and introduce you to the power of web services!