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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.
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The power of ActionScript 3.0
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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, and is compliant
with the ECMAScript (ECMA-262) edition 3 language specification.
For a thorough introduction to ActionScript 3.0, see
ActionScript 3.0 Developer’s Guide
.
For reference information on the language, see the
ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe
Flash Platform
.
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FLA-based User Interface components
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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
Customizing the UI Components
and the
ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe
Flash Platform
.
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New FVLPlayback component adds FLVPlaybackCaptioning
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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.
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The Property inspector and Component inspector
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allow you to change component parameters while authoring
in Flash. For more information, see
Working with component files
and
Set parameters and properties
.
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New collection dialog box
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for the ComboBox, List, and TileList components allows you
to populate their
dataProvider
property through
the user interface. For more information, see
Create a DataProvider
.
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The ActionScript 3.0 event model
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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
.
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Manager classes
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provide an easy way to handle focus and manage styles in
an application. For more information, see the
ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe
Flash Platform
.
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The UIComponent base class
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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 Reference for the Adobe
Flash Platform
.
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Use of a SWC
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in the UI FLA-based components provide ActionScript definitions as
an asset inside the component’s Timeline to speed compilation.
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An easily extendable class hierarchy
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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 Reference for the Adobe
Flash Platform
.
Note:
Flash CS5 supports
both FLA-based and SWC-based components. For more information, see
Component architecture
.
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