ActiveX: The Empire Strikes Back
By Lincoln D. Stein
Like many Webmasters of the old guard who cut their teeth on UNIX-based Web servers, I've been avoiding Microsoft's ActiveX technology, burying my head in the sand and hoping that when I look up again, ActiveX will have withered and blown away. Well, I looked up this week, and ActiveX was definitely not gone. In fact, it's looking mighty healthy. So I hunkered down to dredge through the white papers, position statements, press releases, technical specifications, and other documents to be found at Microsoft's Web site.
What ActiveX Is
The ActiveX Document system is essentially a trimmed-down version of Microsoft's OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) system. You'll recall that OLE blurs the boundaries between applications by allowing several programs to collaborate on one compound document. For example, under OLE an Excel spreadsheet can be embedded within a Word document. When the user clicks on the spreadsheet part of the document, Excel takes charge, replacing the word-processor menus with its own. When the user wants to edit a portion of the document for which Word is responsible, the word-processor menus return.
Under OLE, you must have a copy of the appropriate application preinstalled on your hard disk to view an embedded document. Not so with ActiveX. If the viewer application isn't already installed, the ActiveX system can fetch it from a software repository somewhere on the Internet, install it on your system, and launch it.
