ActiveX scripting architecture supports powerful scripting using languages such as VBScript, JScript, Perl, and others. Microsoft currently provides three hosts for running these scripting languages across the Windows platform:
In addition to having a smaller footprint than the other two scripting hosts, the Windows Scripting Host does not rely on an HTML SCRIPT tag or LANGUAGE attribute to identify a scripting engine. Instead Windows Scripting Host uses the extension of the script file to determine which scripting engine to use. As a result, the script writer does not need to obtain a scripting engine ProgID. The scripting host itself maintains a mapping of script extensions to ProgIDs and uses the Windows association model to launch the appropriate engine for a given script.
For more information about how Windows Scripting Host works, see:
http://www.microsoft.com/management/wsh.htm.