Benefits of using components

Components enable you to separate the process of designing your application from the process of coding. They allow developers to create functionality that designers can use in applications. Developers can encapsulate frequently used functionality into components and designers can customize the size, location, and behavior of components by changing their parameters. They can also change the appearance of a component by editing its graphical elements, or skins.

Components share core functionality such as styles, skins, and focus management. When you add the first component to an application, this core functionality accounts for approximately 20 kilobytes of the size. When you add other components, that initial memory allocation is shared by the added components, reducing the growth in the size of your application.

This section outlines some of the benefits of the ActionScript 3.0 components.

The power of ActionScript 3.0 provides a powerful, object-oriented programming language that is an important step in the evolution of Flash Player capabilities. The language is designed for building rich Internet applications on a reusable code base. ActionScript 3.0 is based on ECMAScript, the international standardized language for scripting. It is compliant with the ECMAScript (ECMA-262) edition 3 language specification. For a thorough introduction to ActionScript 3.0, see Programming ActionScript 3.0. For reference information on the language, see the ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.

FLA-based User Interface components provide easy access to skins for easy customizing while authoring. These components also provide styles, including skin styles, that allow you to customize aspects of the components appearance and load skins at run time. For more information, see Chapter 4, "Customizing the UI Components," on page 989 and the ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.

New FVLPlayback component adds FLVPlaybackCaptioning component along with full screen support, improved live preview, skins that allow you to add color and alpha settings, and improved FLV download and layout features.

The Property inspector and Component inspector allow you to change component parameters while authoring in Flash. For more information, see Adding to and deleting from a document and "Setting parameters and properties" on page 888.

New collection dialog box for the ComboBox, List, and TileList components allows you to populate their dataProvider property through the user interface. For more information, see "Creating a DataProvider" on page 902.

The ActionScript 3.0 event model allows your application to listen for events and invoke event handlers to respond. For more information, see ActionScript 3.0 event handling model and "Handling events" on page 894.

Manager classes provide an easy way to handle focus and manage styles in an application. For more information, see the ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.

The UIComponent base class provides core methods, properties, and events to components that extend it. All of the ActionScript 3.0 user interface components inherit from the UIComponent class. For more information see the UIComponent class in the ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.

Use of a SWC in the UI FLA-based components provide ActionScript definitions as an asset inside the component's Timeline to speed compilation.

An easily extendable class hierarchy using ActionScript 3.0 allows you to create unique namespaces, import classes as needed, and subclass easily to extend components. For more information, see the ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.

NOTE

Flash CS3 supports both FLA-based and SWC-based components. For more information, see "Component architecture" on page 881

Flash CS3