oft has rechristened OLE as a standard for linking Component Object Model (COM) objects across the Internet.
Beginning with Internet Explorer 3.0
(Microsoft's Web browser for Windows 95, which is slated to ship by midyear, with the Mac version to follow later this year) and Internet Information Server (IIS) 2.0 (Microsoft's Web server), ActiveX will be used to transfer active data across the Internet and intranets. The ActiveX Server Framework, which is based on IIS integrated with Windows NT Server, enables Web developers to write to the Microsoft BackOffice family, which includes Microsoft SQL Server.
One troublesome aspect of ActiveX is that several components aren't yet ready. Visual Basic Script, a Visual Basic-like language for automating objects, hadn't entered beta testing as of April. Microsoft's Internet Control Pack, which has several ActiveX controls for implementing HTTP, FTP, e-mail, and other Internet technologies into an application, wasn't slated to ship until the third quarter, nor were the tools for creating other ActiveX controls. And support for OLE on the Macintosh remains elusive.
Some members of the object-oriented
community react to ActiveX with pessimism. "With ActiveX, nothing has changed except the name: It's still COM and OLE," says Chris Stone, president of the Object Management Group (OMG, Framingham, MA). OMG's own Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and its object request brokers (ORBs) are already alive and well in such systems as DEC's ObjectBroker, Hewlett-Packard's ORB+, and IBM's System Object Model (SOM). The OMG has also adopted an interface that fosters bidirectional communication between CORBA and COM, allowing both object models to exist in the same environment.
SunSoft and OMG have come up with a standard for Java applets to connect with CORBA applications: Java Objects Everywhere (JOE). Java applets that can work with a CORBA ORB (known as ORBlets) will be compiled with the OMG's Interface Definition Language compiler. Iona Technologies, Postmodern Computing, and SunSoft are all working on such compilers. This development might be just the boost Java needs to become a major too
l in the Web-page developers' toolbox.
Still, all is not perfect with Java, either. Kevin Hsu, software engineering manager at Web development company Proxima (Vienna, VA), says "Java is nice, but it's dog slow due to its interpreted nature." Just-in-time compilers that compile interpreted Java applications downloaded by a user will help, but Hsu notes that Netscape and Microsoft browsers don't yet have such compilers built in.
Another problem is the possibility of Java security holes. One group, the NASA Automated Systems Internet Response Capability (NASIRC), says that Java is insecure by its very nature. By running on-line programs, such as those that Java and ActiveX enable, client systems cannot check for those programs' compliance with local security requirements.
That's in the short run. In the long run, CORBA's use of proxies and other secu-rity features could make JOE applets safe. Microsoft says its security measures will also make ActiveX safe. For now, though, Java and JOE, se
curity risks and all, are the only real interactive, distributed-object Web languages. ActiveX probably won't have any real impact until the fourth quarter.
ActiveX Chases Java
