Creating Component Skins

You’ve seen the insides of a Spark component...well, at least from the perspective of adding skin support. So, what do you do to create the actual skin? In previous version of Flex, you created an ActionScript class that was, as mentioned, tightly associated with your component and then passed values from the host component to it to set various visual values (color, backgroundColor, radius, and so on).

Luckily, in Flex 4, we can dispense with that unpleasant process and use MXML to declare skins. The advantages here are that you can easily implement and define the various facets of the skin, use design view to actually see a basic representation of your skin prior to adding it to your component, and finally, get applications like Flash Catalyst to do the vast majority of the work for you.