Programming Windows: ActiveX (Premium)

Microsoft announced ActiveX---or as it was originally called, ActiveX Technologies---in March 1996 as a way to bring so-called “active content” to the web. Microsoft would “activate the Internet with ActiveX.” Put simply, ActiveX was Microsoft’s answer to Java, in the same way that VBScript and JScript were its response to JavaScript. Internally, ActiveX was based on the COM technologies that Microsoft has earlier created for OLE 2.0, but made smaller, lighter, and faster for the web.

Well, that was the marketing. In reality, ActiveX was just COM rebranded. By this time, Microsoft had expanded the original COM with DCOM (Distributed COM), which completed the original design for COM by allowing components to interoperate across machine boundaries and over a network. This was particularly important for distributed networks like the Internet. In any event, ActiveX, being COM, allowed developers to write code in the tool of their choice using the language of their choice and then access functionality in components that existed on that same machine or on some other host on the Internet.

ActiveX was aimed at two primary use cases: ActiveX components, which were UI-less objects that would run on a web server and provide programmatic functionality like database access; and ActiveX controls, which were to the web what earlier VBX and OLE custom controls were to Windows applications. There were also lesser-known ActiveX technologies, like ActiveX Documents, which allowed corporate users to view Office documents on their employer’s web-based intranet, Active Scripts, which let developers mix and match between different scripting languages, and the ActiveX Server Framework, for integrating Microsoft BackOffice servers with Internet Information Server (IIS), Microsoft’s web server.

But ActiveX controls quickly became the most popular and well-known ActiveX technology. Based as they were on OLE custom controls, ActiveX benefited from several years of developer experience with the underlying technologies, making them instantly familiar. And since OLE controls were so widely used, many were quickly converted into ActiveX controls. Developers could simply use the same programming languages they had been using, and the same tools too. That assumed the tools had been updated for ActiveX, of course. But Microsoft and third-party developer tool makers like Borland moved quickly to meet this need.

This was important: While Java and scripting languages like JavaScript were immediately popular and drew many developers to the web, many were likewise familiar with tools like Visual C++ and Visual Basic, and they wanted to leverage their investments those products and their underlying languages and frameworks. ActiveX allowed Microsoft’s developer based to move forward to the web without necessarily needing to learn new tools and languages.

Also, Microsoft’s Visual J++ provided ActiveX capabilities for those who did want to learn and...