This component is intended to provide similar, but not necessarily compatible, functionality to that provided by the classic Unix diff utility. That is, given two text files, this component will calculate a set of editing operations (a patch) to migrate from the first to the second. This component also has ColdFusion-specific variations, such as calculating the difference between two structures or arrays or delimited lists. While there are Java-based solutions that could be installed upon the server that do the same thing, this component is intended to be pure ColdFusion so that it could also be used in shared hosting environments where installing Java components would not be an option.