Net reminder - ActiveX

This month we pore over all the details of Activex - a softwaredevelopment kit that you might have forgotten

What is ActiveX?

ActiveX is a technology from Microsoft that is a collection of software for use with the Internet. Most of the IT industry acknowledges that static HTML pages are old hat these days.

When users access a Web site, they want to see animated logos or video clips, and to be able to input quick, fast database queries. ActiveX has been designed to achieve this.

What does it consist of?

Contrary to popular belief, ActiveX is not a new technology: it is an assembly of older technologies that have been polished up and bolted together to be presented under a new, easy to identify brandname - it appears to be a way for Microsoft to get involved in the Internet and the Network Computing paradigm quickly, without having to do any major development work.

The technology was originally derived from Microsoft's component object model (Com). Com was designed as Microsoft's entry into the object-oriented world, comprising a set of technologies including the company's object linking and embedding (OLE) technology, which was designed to enable users to utilise objects on the desktop.

There were other technologies surrounding this, such as OLE components and OLE automation, which were bolted onto OLE using COM as the connecting architecture.

Is it an open standard?

This depends on what you mean by "open". Microsoft has a habit of producing technologies which become de facto standards, partly because the company has, among other things, a lot of market clout. The company has been accused of being particularly protectionist with ActiveX by the object management group (OMG), which was attempting to get Microsoft to integrate Com into its enterprise object communication standard common object request broker architecture (Corba).

Microsoft made some moves towards co-operating but stopped short, announcing what the OMG described as "an incomplete specification" for Com - and reportedly making it difficult for the OMG to swallow the technology and make Corba compatible with it.

On 30 July last year, everything blew up as Microsoft announced that it was making ActiveX an open standard. A month or two later, Microsoft struck a deal with the Open Group, which is responsible for defining and certifying open technology standards, under which the latter would govern ActiveX as an open technology.

Technically, then, you could say that ActiveX is an open technology ... although it is still Microsoft's.

Is it a secure technology?

Not according to the German hacker organisation, the Chaos Club, which was reported to have cracked ActiveX a couple of months ago.

The group was able to infiltrate ActiveX controls so that it could look at data and influence the controls. Despite this, ActiveX customers, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland - which launches its online banking service this spring - remained supportive of ActiveX; which is just as well, since the Bank's entire data transfer system is based on it.

One of the main differences between ActiveX and Java is that the latter uses a "sand box" mechanism, meaning that whatever the Java applet does inside the software-engineered "virtual machine" will not affect the computer running the OS. Theoretically, this means that systems running Java will be secure.

What are its main competitors? Speak to many people in the IT industry and they will tell you that the main competitor to ActiveX is Sun's Java.

Java is a programming language and, while it does compete with parts of ActiveX, another competitor with Microsoft's standard is Java Beans (otherwise known as the Java component architecture) which is a framework that enables Java applets to talk to one another. The other competitor to ActiveX is the OMG's Corba.

What is significant is that Corba has the support of a large number of midrange industry players, and scored a coup last year when Netscape put its full support behind the standard.

Meanwhile, ActiveX is still not strictly speaking an object-oriented system at all - at best, it can be described as a pseudo-object technology.

This is because the system does not demonstrate object-oriented characteristics, such as inheritance.

Should I use it?

It all depends on how open you want your technology to be. Java is a technology supported by hundreds of industry players and available on a myriad of different hardware platforms. ActiveX is a Windows-based system, although Microsoft has been working on versions for other platforms, such as the Macintosh. Additionally, while ActiveX is great for desktop-related activities, it also has to prove itself in an enterprise environment.

The distributed common object model (DCom) shipped in Windows NT 4, is a promising corporate-level object technology, but Corba has been in that space for a much longerand its proponents have greater experience of object technology.

Microsoft's historical antipathy towards true object technology is beginning to show here, and it is up to its customers to make their own choices.