Summary

Components are a powerful object-oriented feature of Flash MX 2004. The new version 2 component model is completely different from the version 1 components , but it provides a much more efficient and object-oriented way of dealing with reusable code and assets.

All components are stored as separate class files and these class files inherit from the MovieClip object and also from specialized component classes, such as UIObject and UIComponent . This provides a much greater separation of visual and code elements.

The UIObject and UIComponent classes contain prebuilt functionality that greatly helps in the development of our own components. During this chapter, we worked in-depth with new component functionality, such as data binding, the component event model, and methods such as dataProvider , selectedItem , and addItem . All this functionality is built into the component classes from which our custom components can inherit, which helps make custom component development a snap.

Components greatly simplify development because they provide reusable functionality across different applications. By changing the structure of components and the inheritance model, Macromedia has made component development simpler and more powerful.