ActiveX is the most recent outgrowth of Microsoft’s COM technology. In early 1997, a new feature of the Java language, “Beans,” was invented by Sun Microsystems and its partners; a Bean is very much like a Java class in that it allows programmers to create a universal software component. Fortunately, the Java Bean specification is very compatible with ActiveX, and in the next chapter, I’ll show you how these two related technologies work together.