Book excerpt: Flex has revolutionized the development of rich Internet applications, giving developers the framework necessary to easily create ever more powerful applications. Components form an essential part of this framework, and once you understand how to fully use them, your productivity and creativity will be taken to a whole new level. Flex 3 Component Solutions will show just what you can achieve with components and exactly how to achieve it. You'll see just how simple it is to use components to create amazing interfaces for your applications be they media players, data visualizations, 3D graphics—the list is long. Finally, there'll be times when you'll want to or have no alternative but to create your own components. This book will show you how to do this for your own ends, or so you can contribute to the Flex component community by distributing them. Flex 3 Component Solutions is a tour de force of components, and all of these components are demonstrated using real-world Flex code that you can use as starting points for your own applications. Take what you learn for this book, and then go out and create your own amazing interfaces quickly and easily: reuse, re-purpose, redesign, and do it all faster and with greater quality control than you ever thought possible.