User Guide

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CHAPTER 12
Flash Player API Overview
This chapter describes the Adobe Flash Player 9 packages provided with the ActionScript 3.0
language.
The Flash Player API refers to all packages, classes, functions, properties, constants, events,
and errors that are in the flash package. They are unique to Flash Player, as opposed to the
top-level classes, such as Date, Math, and XML, or the language elements, which are based on
ECMAScript. The Flash Player API contains features that you expect to find in object-
oriented programming languages, such as the flash.geom package for geometry classes, as well
as features specific to the needs of rich Internet applications, such as the flash.filters package
for expressiveness and the flash.net package for handling data transmission to and from a
server.
The Flash Player API in ActionScript 3.0 contains many new classes that allow you to control
objects and data at a low level. The architecture of the language is completely new and more
intuitive. For example, the API is organized into logical packages: the flash.display package
contains all classes related to the visual display list in Flash Player; the flash.media package
contains classes for working with audio and video; and flash.text contains classes for working
with text in Flash Player applications.
This chapter provides a brief overview of each package and highlights the most important or
commonly used classes and functions in the package. For detailed information about the
classes or package-level functions, see the specific entry in the ActionScript 3.0 Language
Reference.