Flex: What's the difference between an MXML "Component" and an MXML "Module"?

apache-flex mxml
David Wolever picture David Wolever · Jun 17, 2009 · Viewed 9.2k times · Source

As the title suggests, what's the difference between a "Component" (New –> MXML Component) and a "Module" (New –> MXML Module)?

Thanks, David

Answer

Christian Nunciato picture Christian Nunciato · Jun 18, 2009

Modules are compiled into SWFs and loaded at runtime with ModuleLoader, whereas MXML components are compiled into an application. From the Flex docs:

Modules are SWF files that can be loaded and unloaded by an application. They cannot be run independently of an application, but any number of applications can share the modules.

Modules let you split your application into several pieces, or modules. The main application, or shell, can dynamically load other modules that it requires, when it needs them. It does not have to load all modules when it starts, nor does it have to load any modules if the user does not interact with them. When the application no longer needs a module, it can unload the module to free up memory and resources. [...]

Modules are similar to Runtime Shared Libraries (RSLs) in that they separate code from an application into separately loaded SWF files. Modules are much more flexible than RSLs because modules can be loaded and unloaded at run time and compiled without the application.

Hope that helps!

Related questions

Flex Warning: Unable to bind to property 'foo' on class 'Object' (class is not an IEventDispatcher)

I've got an object that contains a dozen or so fields I want to bind to form elements, so that I can use that object to send the data back to the server to be saved. Definition of my container …

Read More
How i write inline conditional statement in Flex with two expressions(case)?

How i write the inline conditional statement in Flex with two expressions(case) like text="{expression, expression2 ? true:false}" Flex compiler only check the first expression and on behalf of that give result.But i want to check both statement …

Read More
Flex 4: Build a Group with a background

I'm trying to build a simple component extending spark.components.Group to have a background color, more specifically a spark.primitives.Rect component stretched to fill the background. This is what I've come up with thus far: <s:Group …

Read More