About Creating Components; Chapter 2: Creating Flex Components - Adobe FLEX 2 - CREATING AND EXTENDING COMPONENTS Manual

CHAPTER 2
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Creating Flex Components
Adobe Flex supports a component-based development model. You use the predefined
components included with Flex to build your applications, and create components for your
specific application requirements. You can create components using MXML or ActionScript.
Defining your own custom components has several benefits. One advantage is that
components let you divide your applications into modules that you can develop and maintain
separately. By implementing commonly used logic within custom components, you can also
build a suite of reusable components that you can share among multiple Flex applications.
In addition, you can extend the Flex class hierarchy to base your custom components on the
set of predefined Flex components. You can create custom versions of Flex visual controls, as
well as custom versions of nonvisual components, such as validators, formatters, and effects.
This topic contains an introduction to the process that you use to create Flex components.
Subsequent topics describe this process in more detail.
Contents

About creating components. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Creating custom components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Where to go from here . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
About creating components
You can build an entire Flex application in a single MXML file that contains both your
MXML code and any supporting ActionScript code. As your application gets larger, your
single file also grows in size and complexity. This type of application would soon become
difficult to understand and debug, and very difficult for multiple developers to work on
simultaneously.
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