ActiveX controls

ActiveX controls, on the other hand, can be used in your other applications as well as in a Web browser. So the ActiveX control you write is much more reusable than any of the other alternatives. ActiveX controls communicate just fine with the VBScript code in the host page using the methods, properties, and events you'd normally use. Finally, you write ActiveX controls in the language of Dr. GUI's favorite development system: Visual C++. (More languages will be available later.)

ActiveX controls are compiled to native code, so they're not cross-platform. But what if the ActiveX control was written in Java and compiled to Java byte codes? The best of both worlds: the power of ActiveX and the interoperability of Java. Microsoft is working on it.

If you have an existing application that doesn't need to be embedded in a Web page, you should make it an ActiveX document. Once you're an OLE in-place editing server, you can become an ActiveX document by supporting just a few additional OLE interfaces—not trivial, but not all that hard, either. The win for you is that users will be able to open your ActiveX documents within their ActiveX document containers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, the Microsoft Office Binder, and the new Windows shell that will ship with Nashville. Dr. GUI thinks that's a lot of functionality for very reasonable effort.