My team has been doing a lot of work with the Mach-II framework lately, and we're extremely heavy users of CFCs. On top of this, we're busy making sure our SDLC complies with the requirements of the Sarbanes Oxley Act. One of the areas of special interest is documentation. The nice thing about CFCs is that they are [relatively] self documenting, provided you populate the various cfcomponent, cffunction, and cfproperty tag attributes. While ColdFusion MX comes with two tools for examining the CFCs on your system. The CFC Explorer can be invoked by entering the URL to any CFC accessible via a URL on your server. In our case, the majority of our CFCs are NOT accessible via URL as they are located in a directory outside of our web root. In this case, you can use the Component Browser that comes with ColdFusion MX. This tool can be accessed like this:

http://localhost/cfide/componentutils/componentdoc.cfm

Using this tool, however, requires that you use either the RDS or CF Admin password to access the browser. This may or may not be an issue depending on your local setup and policies. In any case, the auto generated documentation created by the CFC Explorer and the Component Browser is identical. It's a good start, but there are an increasing number of third party tools that take the basic concepts in these tools and extend them. I'm going to share the three that I'm aware of and have used in various capacities to auto-generate documentation on my CFCs. If you are aware of other tools, let me know!

CFCRemoteDocumenter (Nathan Dintenfass)

CFC Explorer With Usage (Marcantonio da Silva)

CFC Documentation Tool (Spike Milligan)

Component Invoker & Browser (Brandon Purcell)

Two new CFCs have been posted to the site in the past few weeks. Check out checkEquality by Qasim Rasheed and queryTool by Joe Rinehart on the CFC page.