What Is an Object?

An object is a conceptual representation of an entity within a system. In short, everything is an object. Within Macromedia Flash MX 2004, there are several familiar entities with which we deal; these entities are objects. Among these are movie clips, buttons , and components ”in fact, everything that can be programmatically interacted with in Flash is an object.

Objects consist of characteristics that describe them (properties) and behaviors that describe what they can do or what can be done to them ( methods ). A Flash MovieClip object has properties describing where it is on the Stage ( _x , _y ), its opacity ( _alpha ), the number of frames ( _totalframes ), and so on. There are also behaviors of movie clips in common usage, including play() , stop() , goToAndStop() , and so on.

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See Chapter 3, "We're All Described by Our Properties," for more details on properties, and Chapter 4, "Method to the Madness," for more details on methods.