Understanding Classpaths
Friday, June 30th, 2006
All objects in recent versions of ActionScript are defined by something called classes. Think of classes as blueprints that determine the unique combination of characteristics, actions, and reactions that comprises a particular object of a certain type. By “object,” we’re talking about the familiar things a Flash developer deals with every day: movie clips (the MovieClip class), text fields (the TextField class), buttons, sounds, math functions, UI Components, you name it. They are all defined by classes.
Out of the box, Flash provides hundreds of built-in ActionScript classes. The great part is, you can even write your own! But there’s a catch: the Flash compiler, which converts ActionScript into Flash Player bytecode, must be told where new classes are located, or it won’t be able to find them. That’s what my latest Community MX article is about, and this one happens to be free content. You can read it here:
