User Guide

16 About Components
Benefits of using components
Components enable you to separate the process of designing your application from the
process of coding. They also let you to reuse code, either in components that you create, or by
downloading and installing components created by other developers.
Components allow coders to create functionality that designers can use in applications.
Developers can encapsulate frequently used functionality into components and designers can
customize the look and behavior of components by changing parameters in the Property
inspector or the Component inspector.
Flash developers can use the Macromedia Exchange at www.macromedia.com/go/exchange to
exchange components. By using components, you no longer need to build each element in a
complex web application from scratch. You can find the components you need and put them
together in a Flash document to create a new application.
Components that are based on the version 2 architecture share core functionality such as
styles, event handling, skinning, focus management, and depth management. When you add
the first version 2 component to an application, there is approximately 25K added to the
document that provides this core functionality. When you add additional components, that
same 25K is reused for them as well, resulting in a smaller increase in size to your document
than you may expect. For information about upgrading components, see “Upgrading version
1 components to version 2 architecture” on page 62.
Component categories
Components included with Flash fall into the following five categories (the locations of their
ActionScript source files roughly correspond to these categories as well and are listed in
parentheses):
■ Data components (mx.data.*)
Data components allow you to load and manipulate information from data sources; the
WebServiceConnector and XMLConnector components are data components.
■ FLVPlayback component (mx.video.FLVPlayback)
The FLVPlayback component lets you readily include a video player in your Flash
application to play progressive streaming video over HTTP, from a Flash Video Streaming
Service (FVSS), or from Flash Communication Server (FCS).
NOTE
The source files for the data components aren’t installed with Flash. However, some
of the supporting ActionScript files are installed.