User Guide
About compiled clips and SWC files 19
Themes allow you to drag a predesigned appearance from the library onto a set of
components. (See “About themes” on page 108.)
The Halo theme is the default theme that the version 2 components use. (See “About themes”
on page 108.)
Manager classes provide an easy way to handle focus and depth in a application. (See
“Creating custom focus navigation” on page 58 and “Managing component depth in a
document” on page 59.)
The base classes UIObject and UIComponent provide core methods, properties, and events
to components that extend them. (See “UIComponent class” and “UIObject class” in the
Components Language Reference.)
Packaging as a SWC file allows easy distribution and concealable code. See Chapter 6,
“Creating Components,” on page 125.
Built-in data binding is available through the Component inspector. For more information,
see “Data Integration (Flash Professional Only)” in Using Flash.
An easily extendable class hierarchy using ActionScript 2.0 allows you to create unique
namespaces, import classes as needed, and subclass easily to extend components. See Chapter
6, “Creating Components,” on page 125 and the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.
About compiled clips and SWC files
A compiled clip is a package of precompiled Flash symbols and ActionScript code. It’s used to
avoid recompiling symbols and code that will not be changed. A movie clip can also be
“compiled” in Flash and converted to a compiled clip. For example, a movie clip with a lot of
ActionScript code that doesn’t change often could be converted to a compiled clip. The
compiled clip behaves just like the movie clip from which it was compiled, but compiled clips
appear and publish much faster than regular movie clips. Compiled clips can’t be edited, but
they do have properties that appear in the Property inspector and the Component inspector.
Components included with Flash are not FLA files—they are compiled clips (that have been
packaged into compiled clip (SWC) files. SWC is the Macromedia file format for distributing
components; it contains a compiled clip, the component’s ActionScript class file, and other
files that describe the component. For details about SWC files, see “Exporting and
distributing a component” on page 182.
NOTE
Flash 8 has several features that are not supported by the v2 components, including 9-
slice (sometimes referred to as “scale-9”), FlashType, and bitmap caching.