What's Next
This chapter showed you how to implement conditional processing in a ColdFusion script. You learned how to construct an "if-then" rule using <cfif>. You next learned how to extend your <cfif> commands to "if-then-else" rules by adding a <cfelse> tag. You also saw how to test other conditions in a <cfif> command by adding a <cfelseif> tag. Finally, you learned how to use <cfswitch> to consider an expression with many possible outcomes.
ColdFusion was originally released as a tool to help Web developers communicate with back-end databases. Indeed, many of the tags you've been using so far such as <cfset>, <cfoutput>, and <cfif> used to be written as <dbset>, <dboutput>, and <dbif> to reflect ColdFusion's early focus on database connectivity. As ColdFusion matured into a more robust application development environment, the db was dropped in favor of cf. ColdFusion still enables developers to work with databases, and the next two chapters will show you how to compose and issue commands to databases from within your ColdFusion scripts.