Live Previews

One of the most obvious pieces of integration that we, as component developers, can provide is the live preview. Live previews have always been hit and miss in the past. When components were first introduced to the Flash Authoring tool many years ago, it was up to the developer to create a visual representation of the component so that other developers could see what the component actually looked like within the Flash Authoring tool.

Fortunately, time has moved forward, and so has the process by which live previews are created. Now, all you need to do is convert your components into a SWC. After you create a SWC of your components, distribute it and the recipients just need to drop it into their libs directory in their Flex project to access the components it contains. The full process is detailed in Chapter 12.