Synopsis
In its simplest form, like many other web scripting languages CFML augments standard HTML files with database commands, conditional operators, high-level formatting functions, and other elements to produce web applications. CFML also includes numerous other constructs including ColdFusion Components (CFCs), CFML's version of objects, that allow for separation of business logic from presentation.
CFML can be written using either tags or CFScript, which is an ECMA script style language.
The pages in a CFML application include the server-side CFML tags and functions in addition to HTML tags, and modern CFML applications also tend to have CFCs that are accessed by the CFML pages for executing business logic. When a web browser requests a page in a ColdFusion application, it is automatically pre-processed by the ColdFusion application server.
CFML can also be used to generate other languages, aside from HTML, such as XML, JavaScript, CSS, and so on.
Despite the name, CFML is not a markup language. It is also not SGML, since certain core CFML features prevent it from complying.
The CFML engine is configured in such a way that certain file extensions on the server (.cfm, .cfc) are handed off to the CFML engine for processing. In the case of the Java-based engines this is accomplished via Java servlets. The CFML engine only processes CFML tags and functions; it returns text outside of CFML tags and functions to the web server unchanged.
Read more about this topic: ColdFusion Markup Language