Adobe® Flash® CS5 Professional is the standard authoring tool for producing high-impact web experiences. Components are the building blocks for the rich Internet applications that provide these experiences. A component is a movie clip with parameters that allow you to customize the component either during authoring in Flash or at run time with Adobe® ActionScript® methods, properties, and events. 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 allow you to easily and quickly build robust applications with a consistent appearance and behavior. This manual describes how to build applications with Adobe ActionScript 3.0 components. The Adobe® ActionScript® 3.0 Language and Components Reference describes each component's application programming interface (API).
You can use components created by Adobe®, download components created by other developers, or create your own components.