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 Macromedia Flash, writing ActionScript, and Macromedia Flash Player.

This book assumes that you already have Flash MX 2004 or Flash MX Professional 2004 installed and know how to use it. Before using components, you should complete the lesson "Create a user interface with components" (select Help > How Do I > Quick Tasks > Create a user interface with components).

If you want to write as little ActionScript as possible, you can drag components into a document, set their parameters in the Property inspector or in the Components Inspector panel, and attach an on() handler directly to a component in the Actions panel to handle component events.

If you are a programmer who wants to create more robust applications, you can create components dynamically, use their APIs to set properties and call methods at runtime, and use the listener event model to handle events.

For more information, see Working with Components.