| Macromedia's architecture is like a chest filled with precious jewels, and this book is quite simply the key to open it! One of the most important tools provided with Flash is the Macromedia Component Architecture: a framework of components written in ActionScript 2, based on established design patterns, that provides a wealth of functionality you can just bolt on to your Flash applications when desired. This can save you an enormous amount of time during application development and help you improve the quality of your code. What's more, the source code is included, so if you can't find the component you need within the component architecture, you can just modify existing components to create your own!
Expert Flash developer and author Antonio De Donatis gives you everything you need to master Flash components. In the first part, he shows you how the architecture works, how to create effective component-based applications, and how to create your own custom components from what's already provided. The second part shows how XML can be used to effectively describe and dynamically create not only single component instances, but whole applications based on any number of components.
The last part of the book is a comprehensive reference to using all of the components already available in the Macromedia Component Architecture. It includes a specific chapter dedicated to each of the UI components like basic usage, component management, customization, and practical examples showing usage of each component.
About the Author
Antonio De Donatis, who graduated in Computer Science from Pisa University, has been designing and implementing object-oriented software since 1989, seems like a lifetime, when the first OOP developing tools appeared on the market. So far Antonio has managed, designed, and in several cases single-handedly implemented numerous projects for a variety of industries, ranging from media/communications to pharmaceuticals.
Antonio has worked for both large corporations and leading new media agencies, and currently trades under the name of Managed Source Limited, based in Surrey, England, where he has lived since 1998 after moving from Italy, his native country.
His commercial experience with Flash goes back to the fourth version of the software, released in 1999. In recent years, the object-oriented evolution of ActionScript has allowed him to reuse knowledge and techniques that he mastered when utilizing older programming languages such as C++ and Java.
Antonio is a specialist in the design of component-based architectures for the implementation of knowledge and content management systems and is now working on several projects, including the open source XML layout engine for Flash mentioned in this book, the latest version of which can be downloaded from www.xleff.org.
Antonio considers programming a form of art and also enjoys chess, painting, and photography. |
