Introduction: Getting Started With Components; Intended Audience - MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004-USING COMPONENTS Use Manual

INTRODUCTION
Getting Started with Components
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 are the professional
standard authoring tools for producing high-impact web experiences. Components are the
building blocks for the Rich Internet Applications that provide those 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 and describes each
component's application programming interface (API). It includes usage scenarios and procedural
samples for using the Flash MX 2004 or Flash MX Professional 2004 version 2 components, as
well as descriptions of the component APIs, in alphabetical order.
You can use components created by Macromedia, download components created by other
developers, or create your own components.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Intended audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
System requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
About the documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Typographical conventions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Terms used in this manual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Additional resources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Intended audience

This book is for developers who are building Flash MX 2004 or Flash MX Professional 2004
applications and want to use components to speed development. You should already be familiar
with developing applications in Flash and writing ActionScript.
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