Is ActiveX Dead?

Norvin Leach
MSDN Online News Editor

Is ActiveX dead?

No.

This story comes up occasionally, and it's wrong, for one simple reason: ActiveX is a brand name for a key set of Windows component technologies. If we got rid of those technologies, we'd be gutting Windows. And we're not going to do that. Here's another reason: ActiveX is a $400 million a year market for third-party developers. We won't let that go either.

But when I looked up ActiveX on www.microsoft.com, I got a weird message that said, "Sorry! . . ."

OK, so we screwed up. That was a bad URL redirector. If you looked for the ActiveX page, you were mistakenly sent to the Active Platform page. Active Platform has been swallowed up by the larger, more relevant Windows DNA architecture. It's all part of our effort to make our message more coherent. ActiveX isn't dead. It just moved to a new house, and the post office messed up the forwarding address.

Tell me again exactly what ActiveX is

Component packaging technology for the Web. ActiveX controls are the smaller, faster descendants of VBX (Visual Basic eXtension controls) and OCX (OLE Controls). It provides a way to package COM components and pop them into applications, particularly Web browsers. If you want to learn more about it, check the ActiveX section on our COM Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/com/). If you want to see a catalog of commercial ActiveX controls, try Browserwatch (http://browserwatch.internet.com/activex/activex-big.html) or C/Net's How-To site (http://www.activex.com/).

It's part of COM?

Think of it this way. COM is our set of services that let components talk to each other. (COM+, which won't show up for at least a year, is a package of enhancements to that.) ActiveX uses these COM services. An ActiveX component is a COM component.

But how does ActiveX compete with Java?

Ah, yes. This is the root of the problem. Since it was introduced, people have stretched the definition of ActiveX to make a point. It was convenient to use "ActiveX" as a catchall to describe our component technology. Eventually, some people saw ActiveX as the whole platform. It's not. It's just the packaging and deployment technology. If anything, it competes on some levels with Java Beans. Also, let's be precise about "competing with Java." If you're talking about Java, the language, its competitors are other languages, like C++. But if you're using Sun's idea of Java as a platform, then the competitor is Windows.

How does this fit in with Windows DNA?

The Windows Distributed interNet Application Architecture (forgive the odd capitalization) is a roadmap that shows how Windows and other Microsoft products and technologies are used to create networked applications. Scalable, robust . . . you know all the words. Basically, it's a framework that tells you how our technologies fit together. COM is part of it, and so is ActiveX.