Flash technology strongly came into web design. The best evidence of this fact is that more and more websites are characterized by presence of the animated elements in the design, such as flash images, flash banners, animated galleries, flash maps, players, charts and much more. These active elements, or Flash components, brighten up the website design; make browsing more pleasant and convenient and websites – original and up-to-date.

Flash components are separate full-fledged Flash extensions that can be easily built into your Macromedia Adobe Flash design. Flash components are characterized by their own adjustable parameters and due to self-contained functionality they can be easily integrated into your project and then reused within different Flash projects. Components can include graphics as well as code. For example, a component can be a radio button, a dialog box, a preload bar, a menu bar, or even something that has no graphics at all, such as a timer, a server connection utility, or a custom XML parser. And rather than creating code for these widgets once again by yourself, you may just drag them into your FLA file. So, as you can see, these Flash files are very convenient and greatly save developer’s time. And the main focus for developer here is to create an editable component, built in the same style as the User Interface components. In other words, flash components should be compatible with the opther User Interface components, and there are many conventions that should be followed correctly on order to reach the goal.

Speaking about the exact definition of what a flash component is, we may say that there are as many opinions as there are flash developers. Here is a definition given by O’Reilly Web DevCenter: “The answer to “what is a Flash MX component?” depends partly on your point of view. From a traditional Flash point of view, components are effectively ready-made movie clips that you install and drag into your movies. From a programmer’s point of view, components are customizable building blocks that can be added to an application visually or programmatically and then wired into the application’s logic and data.”

Let’s take a quick look into history. The notion “Flash component” first appeared within Macromedia Flash MX as version 6, released on March 15, 2002. But the predecessor of Flash component initially is considered to be Flash MX’s version of Flash 5 smart clip, which is a movie-clip symbol that allows its clip parameters to be set via a graphical user interface (GUI) in the authoring tool. But from that time components replaced and extended Smart Clips introduced in earlier versions of Flash.

Flash components can be classified for convenience according to the following categories:

- Image effects components;
- Slide show components;
- Photo galleries;
- Text effects;
- Movie Clip effects;
- Flash forms components;
- Audio components;
- Video components;
- Navigation components (scrollbars, buttons, flash menus, etc.)
- Educational project components (flash hints, polls, drag-and-drop, etc.)

Flash components are usually distributed as .mx files. You’ll need the “Extension Manager” to install them. Extension Manager can be downloaded at the Macromedia Flash Exchange. But also code can be distributed in a component, in a .as file included in other .fla files or in a .swf file. The distribution method you choose will depend on your situation.

Now let’s take look at the most widely-used examples of Flash components that greatly simplify the development process and enhance the website functionality.

Flash Photo Gallery. This Flash photo gallery will help you easily post any images on your site in a matter of minutes, it forms a slideshow automatically. The gallery supports multiple categories what helps users sort images into different folders. It also provides an ability to add image descriptions. The gallery generates thumbnail image previews and big previews.

Website menu and navigation. Due to Flash technology the website menu can be presented in the most extraordinary ways, just like this 3D Carousel text menu.

Created by FlashTuning

Or if you are one of the followers of traditional horizontal website menu, this example is for you. It’s a simple menu bar component that reads data from array object. Created by FlashComponents.net

The best way to learn about the components is to use them!

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Additional information about Flash Components:

Macromedia Flash MX Components Overview
Creating components in Macromedia Flash MX
What Is a Flash MX Component?
Creating ActionScript 3.0 components in Flash