Distributed Computing with ActiveX
Microsoft's Active Platform Meets the Enterprise
By Ken North
Nineteen ninety-six was a watershed year for the computing industry, as the World Wide Web captured people's imagination and accelerated the transition to distributed computing. Microsoft unveiled the first wave of scalable enterprise technology that it forecast in 1995. Despite a commanding presence on desktop PCs, in May 1995 Microsoft announced a component-based, server-centric enterprise strategy. Several months later, it joined the parade of Web-product vendors when it introduced
ActiveX, a component-based architecture to service Windows and Web applications. Microsoft has since submitted ActiveX to the standards process. Active Group, part of the Open Group comprised of X/Open and the Open Systems Foundation, will manage ActiveX on behalf of about 80 consortium members. At its November 1996 Professional Developer Conference (PDC), Microsoft presented distributed-computing solutions that use ActiveX, Active Server, and other Windows, enterprise, and Web technologies.
The goal of the new tools, servers, and application programming interfaces (APIs) is to support the development of distributed applications that scale up from desktop, to work group, to enterprise, to the Web. Each step in that progression represents a sizable increase in complexity, number of users, demand on resources, and potential problems.
UNIX is popular for server applications that support increasing numbers of users by adding multiple processors and a parallel architecture.
