Exceptions include any event that disrupts the normal flow of instructions in a ColdFusion page, such as failed database operations, missing include files, or developer-specified events. Ordinarily, when ColdFusion encounters an exception, it stops processing and displays an error message or an error page specified by a cferror tag or the Administrator Site-wide Error Handler setting. However, you can use the ColdFusion exception handling tags to catch and process runtime exceptions directly in ColdFusion pages.
This ability to handle exceptions directly in your application pages enables your application to do the following: