User Guide

7
Introduction
Macromedia Flash Basic 8 and Macromedia Flash Professional 8 are the standard authoring
tools for producing high-impact web experiences. Components are the building blocks for the
Rich Internet Applications that provide these experiences. A component is a movie clip with
parameters that are set during authoring in Macromedia Flash, and with ActionScript
methods, properties, and events that allow you to customize the component at runtime.
Components are designed to allow developers to reuse and share code, and to encapsulate
complex functionality that designers can use and customize without using ActionScript.
Components are built on version 2 of the Macromedia Component Architecture, which
allows you to easily and quickly build robust applications with a consistent appearance and
behavior. This book describes how to build applications with version 2 components. The
related Components Language Reference describes each component’s application programming
interface (API). It includes usage scenarios and procedural samples for using the Flash version
2 components, as well as descriptions of the component APIs, in alphabetical order.
You can use components created by Macromedia, download components created by other
developers, or create your own components.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Intended audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
System requirements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
About the documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Typographical conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Terms used in this manual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Additional resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9