<CFTREE> has been part of ColdFusion since CF2 - originally a Java applet, and then a Flash control, and in
ColdFusion 8 an HTML tree control with powerful Ajax support. To demonstrate how to use the new HTML <CFTREE>, here is an example that will let you browse the file system tree on your server. What makes this an Ajax control is that the entire tree is not loaded on startup. Rather, it is loaded incrementally, minimal data is loaded on startup, and when a node is expanded an asynchronous call is made back to the server to obtain the children for that node, and so on. This improves performance (by not requiring that entire trees be loaded if they are not needed), and also simplifies actual tree data (formatting and parsing nested tree data is not pretty).
The client-side code for this example is really simple, as seen here:
<cfform>
<cftree name="dirtree" format="html">
<cftreeitem bind="cfc:dirtree.getDirEntries({cftreeitempath}, {cftreeitemvalue})">
</cftree>
</cfform>
