Adobe Flash CS3 Professional components are building blocks for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). By providing complex pieces that behave in a consistent way and are ready to use and customize, components significantly reduce the time and effort needed to develop Flash applications. A component can be a simple user interface control, such as the Button or the CheckBox component, or a mechanism for displaying data, such as the DataGrid or TileList component. The FLVPlayback component provides a video player that you can easily add to your Internet application.

Rather than creating a custom button, combo box, list, or video player, you can simply drag a component from the Components panel into your Flash document during authoring. You can also easily customize the look and feel of these components to suit your application design. Components share runtime libraries; once you've used one component in your application, adding another one does not greatly impact the size of your SWF file at run time.

Each component includes an ActionScript application programming interface (API) that allows you to customize it at run time. The API allows you to handle events that occur when a user interacts with a component or when something significant happens to it. The API also enables you to set properties and call methods and to apply styles and skins to customize a component's appearance. Using ActionScript, you can also create a component instance at run time.

Adobe Flash CS3 includes ActionScript 2.0 components as well as the new ActionScript 3.0 components. You cannot mix these two sets of components. When you create a new Flash document, Flash CS3 presents either ActionScript 3.0 components or ActionScript 2.0 components based on whether you specify Flash File (ActionScript 3.0) or Flash File (ActionScript 2.0). After that, and when you open an existing document, Flash determines which set of components to present based on whether the Publish Settings specify ActionScipt 2.0 or ActionScript 3.0.

ActionScript 3.0 components are divided into two sets:

• User Interface
• Video

For more information on ActionScript 3.0 components, see the ActionScript 3.0 components section of this article.

There are four sets of ActionScript 2.0 components:

• Data components
• Media components
• User interface (UI) components
• Video

For more information on ActionScript 2.0 components, see the ActionScript 2.0 components section of this article.

Requirements

To follow along with this learning guide, you will need to install the following software:

Flash CS3 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge

This article assumes you are familiar with the Flash workspace and have a basic knowledge of working with Flash files. A familiarity with ActionScript 3.0 is helpful as well.

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