As you write more and larger ColdFusion applications, you will start looking for ways to improve the performance of your applications. There are many ways to do this but one of the easiest is to use ColdFusion's caching mechanisms to reduce the amount of work your application has to do over and over. Caching simply refers to the idea that you create a piece of content or data once and hold it in application memory for some period of time. During that time frame, any part of your application that needs that content or data uses the copy that was previously generated rather than regenerating it.
ColdFusion has several different caching mechanisms built in, but they generally fall into two main categories--programmatic caching and application server caching.
##Programmmatic Caching This type of caching is controlled by your application code. You decide which parts of your application would benefit from being cached and use CFML tags and attributes to determine what content is cached and how long your applicati