Citrix has successfully developed and marketed WinFrame as a thin-client/server adaptation of Microsoft Windows NT. Microsoft further validated the Citrix concept of thin-client/server computing when it licensed the MultiWin technology as the multiuser technology to be used for the Hydra server. For Microsoft, this multiuser technology supplements the existing family of Windows operating systems, and it allows Microsoft to use Windows to compete with network computers.
With Citrix WinFrame, the Windows NT platform is evolving toward a multiuser system.
Microsoft also embraced the Internet and Web technologies by introducing ActiveX, a technology that can be used either with or instead of Java. ActiveX was developed by Microsoft for sharing information and components among different applications. (See Figure 2-11.) It is an outgrowth of two other Microsoft technologies: OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) and COM (Component Object Model). ActiveX supports new features that enable it to take advantage of the Internet. For example, an ActiveX control, much like a Java applet, can be automatically downloaded and executed by a Web browser. A fundamental difference between ActiveX and Java, however, is that ActiveX is not a programming language. ActiveX defines how applications can share information and can be used with several different programming languages, including C, C++, Visual Basic, and Java.
ActiveX is a technology that facilitates sharing data.
FIGURE 2-11
ActiveX controls can be used in Web pages.
Let’s tie ActiveX and multiuser technologies together. As developers create ActiveX controls or components that talk to each other and work together, they can be deployed through an Internet browser that’s running in a thin-client scenario on a server. In this case, if a control must be downloaded, it’s downloaded once and then made available to all users accessing that browser. The bot-tom line is that regardless of the technology, the architecture can be optimized and delivered over a thin-client scenario to a wider audience with various hardware devices.