About ColdFusion components

A ColdFusion component (CFC) is a file saved with the extension .cfc. A CFC can contain data and functions. Within a CFC, data is referred to as properties. Although you use the cffunction tag to define functions within a CFC, they are typically referred to as methods instead of functions.

The page on which you define a CFC is also known as a component page. Component pages use the same tags and functions that regular CFML pages do, plus a small number of special tags (in particular, the cfcomponent tag) and tag attributes.

You define related methods in a CFC. Unlike ColdFusion custom tags, a single CFC can perform many related actions, defined in multiple methods. The methods can share a data context, such as metadata and scoping, or manage a particular database or set of tables. For example, you can define the methods to insert, update, delete, and retrieve records from a particular database or table in one CFC.