This book is for developers who are building Flash applications and want to use components to speed development. You should already be familiar with developing applications in Flash and writing ActionScript.
If you are less experienced with writing ActionScript, you can add components to a document, set their parameters in the Property inspector or Component inspector, and use the Behaviors panel to handle their events. For example, you could attach a Go To Web Page behavior to a Button component that opens a URL in a web browser when the button is clicked without writing any ActionScript code.
If you are a programmer who wants to create more robust applications, you can create components dynamically, use ActionScript to set properties and call methods at runtime, and use the listener event model to handle events.
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.
Download free ebook : Macromedia–Flash:_Using_Components.pdf
