Where To Go From Here - Adobe FLEX 2 - CREATING AND EXTENDING COMPONENTS Manual

Deploying components
When you deploy your custom components as MXML or ActionScript files, you typically
deploy them in the same directory structure as your application files, in a directory specified
in the ActionScript classpath, or for Flex Data Services, in the WEB-INF/flex/user_classes
directory.
For security reasons, you might not deploy your custom components as source code files.
Alternatively, you can deploy your components as SWC files or as part of a Runtime Shared
Library (RSL).
A SWC file is an archive file for Flex components. SWC files make it easy to exchange
components among Flex developers. You need only exchange a single file, rather than the
MXML or ActionScript files and images and other resource files. In addition, the SWF file
inside a SWC file is compiled, which means that the code is obfuscated from casual view.
SWC files can contain one or more components and are packaged and expanded with the
PKZip archive format. You can open and examine a SWC file using WinZip, JAR, or other
archiving tool. However, you should not manually change the contents of a SWC file, and
you should not try to run the SWF file that is in a SWC file outside of a SWC file.
To create a SWC file, use the compc utility in the flex_install_dir/bin directory. The compc
utility generates a SWC file from MXML component source files and/or ActionScript
component source files. For more information on compc, see Chapter 9, "Using the Flex
Compilers," in Building and Deploying Flex 2 Applications.
One way to reduce the size of your application's SWF file is by externalizing shared assets into
stand-alone files that can be separately downloaded and cached on the client. These shared
assets are loaded by any number of applications at run time, but only need to be transferred to
the client once. These shared files are known as Runtime Shared Libraries or RSLs.
For more information, including information on how to create an RSL file, see Chapter 10,
"Using Runtime Shared Libraries," in Building and Deploying Flex 2 Applications.

Where to go from here

The remaining topics in this manual are divided into sections that correspond to the different
types of components that you can create. For more information on creating components, see
the following parts of this manual:
Part 2, "Creating MXML Components," on page 75
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Part 3, "Creating ActionScript Components," on page 119
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Part 4, "Creating Nonvisual Flex Components," on page 205
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Where to go from here 23