Chapter 6. Skinning and Styles

The previous chapter discussed Flex Framework components that encourage standard and efficient development. However, when using a framework of components you often lose a certain degree of visual customization, and the resulting applications have a “cookie-cutter” appearance. To offset this side effect, the Flex 4 Spark components are equipped with a new and improved skinning architecture.

In Flex 4, a skin is a class, usually defined in MXML, that extends s:Skin and determines the visual appearance of a Spark component. The Spark component that is being skinned, also referred to as the host component, can declare and access parts in the Skin class. This new skinning architecture creates a greater separation between functionality (in the host component) and design (in the skin component). This separation allows skins and Spark components to be easily reused and updated with a minimal amount of code refactoring.