Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional is the standard authoring tool for producing powerful web content.
Components are the building blocks for making these rich Internet applications. A "component" is a movie clip with parameters that you can use to customize the component when authoring in Flash or at run time, as well as ActionScript™ methods, properties, and events. These components are designed to allow developers to reuse and share code, as well as to encapsulate complex functionality so that designers can use and customize it without writing ActionScript.
Components make it easy and fast to build powerful applications with consistent appearance and behavior. This manual describes how to build applications using ActionScript 3.0 components. The application programming interface (API) for each component is described in the ActionScript 3.0 Language and Component Reference.
You can use components created by Adobe, download components created by other developers, and create your own components.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Target audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
System Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
About this document. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Typographic conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Terms used in this manual. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Other Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Intended Audience This manual is intended for developers who are building Flash applications and want to use components to speed development. You should already be familiar with developing Flash applications and writing ActionScript.
If you're not new to writing ActionScript, you can add a component to your document, set its parameters in the Property inspector or the Component inspector, and then use the Behavior panel to handle its events. For example, you don't need to write any
ActionScript code, you can attach the "Go to web page" behavior to a Button component, which opens a URL in a Web browser when the user clicks the button.
If you want to create a more powerful application, you can create components dynamically, use ActionScript to set properties and call methods at run time, and use the event listener model to handle events.
See Chapter 2, "Working with Components" on page 31 for more information.
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