It seems that occasionally I am faced with the prospect of working with sites which defiantly use Active X objects to interact with a web browser. In this case the guilty party would be the niche audience of Vector Vest market timing algorithm. I would venture to guess they may only get < 10,000 page views per day. Of course these sites beg and implore end-users to use M$ IE. I like millions of other people do not use IE. Why would developers deliberately build a platform which only works with one web browser?
Well, the flippant remark would be ignorance. Perhaps they get kickbacks directly from the Redmond Woolly mammoth? Who knows. The more likely scenario is laziness. I would venture to guess, that writing objects using the Gecko rendering engine is no more difficult than writing ActiveX objects.
I am not a web developer, so I welcome feedback from those of you who are adept in writing these applications. If I am not mistaken Active X was the answer to JavaScript. The goal for Java and JavaScript was "write once" platform agnostic. Does anyone know the goal of ActiveX ? One can only guess.
Well, I suppose I could run Xen or some other emulator and run an instance of Windows. Clearly overkill for one application that I'm only likely to use for another few weeks. I could run a makeshift box and install XP. Nope don't want to do that either.
It seems that Active X has been an Achilles Heel in the Linux Community for quite awhile. Judging from the aforementioned link, KDE and GNOME (specifically Mono) developers have been sniping at each other over the broken and general disrepair of ActiveX.
More updates to follow.
ActiveX was designed to compete with Netscape Plugins in the same fashion VBScript was designed to compete with JavaScript.
I believe the reason ActiveX is still around is due to intranet-based technologies to run applications like terminal emulators.
I personally prefer JScript libraries..
Whaddup Ed?? Thx for your comment. My gripe is that Active X is not a published standard. Hence, it is very difficult to implement in a clean or understandable way. Why people insist upon using it is beyond my comprehension. I too prefer Javascript.