What is a Bean?
Although the terminology evokes the initial reaction of cooking ingredients or a tin of food from a supermarket, the Bean is an incredibly important piece of the object-oriented design pattern.
The term 'Bean' originates from the Java programming language, and for those developers out there who enjoy their coffee as much as I do, the thought process behind it will make sense: Java = Coffee = Coffee Bean = Bean.
A Bean is basically the building block for your object. Think of it as a blueprint for the information you want each object to hold and contain. In relation to other ColdFusion components, the Bean is a relatively simple CFC that primarily has two roles in life:
to store information or a collection of values
to return the information or collection of values when required
But what is it really?
Typically, a ColdFusion bean is a single CFC built to encapsulate and store a single record of data, and not a recordset query result, which would normally hold more than one record...
