Accessibility

Flex Article

 

Understanding the Flex Linker and Loaders


Roger Gonzalez

Roger Gonzalez

www.macromedia.com

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Flex and Flash
  3. Flex Applications
  4. Guts of a Flex SWF File
  5. Symbols, Definitions, and Dependencies
  6. References
  7. Requirements
  8. SWC Files: Precompiled Component Libraries
  9. Putting It All Together: An Example
  10. Where to Go from Here
Comments
Created:
4 October 2004
User Level:
Advanced

Macromedia Flex shields authors from the complex world of SWF file construction, but advanced developers know that understanding a system's internals helps them build better applications.

The Loader and Linker subsystems of the Flex compiler are responsible for choreographing the conversion of source files and multimedia assets into SWF files. Understanding the Flex compiler architecture will help you effectively use Flex with other Macromedia Flash tools—particularly if you are an advanced Flash developer used to micromanaging the SWF file creation process!

Requirements

This article assumes the reader to be an experienced Flex user with a reasonable mastery of ActionScript and MXML (the Macromedia Flex Markup Language), and an insatiable curiosity for low-level details about how Flex works.

Because this is not a tutorial, it does not require a running installation of Flex. To explore the concepts of this article further, however, you might want to install Flex to run the code examples. See the ReadMe file in the load_link_example.zip (ZIP, 279K) for deployment instructions.

Macromedia Flex

Tutorials and sample files:

Page 1 of 10
Next Page

About the author

Roger Gonzalez is a Principal Engineer on the Flex compiler team. Prior to Macromedia, Roger has done everything from working on autonomous underwater robots to running the engineering group at a 3D game development studio. Roger is an avid motorcyclist, and recently relocated to California in order to pursue year-round riding.