The Active Channel Server system can be broken down into the following basic parts:
Active Channel Server provides an extremely flexible set of COM/Automation compliant objects for creation and storage of channel information. Since they are COM compliant, any programming language that supports the COM can access them. These objects form the core of the system, and it is through these objects that the core functionality of the system is expressed.
The Channel Agents are scripts that programmatically update the data stored using the COM objects during a refresh cycle. They can be written in any scripting language that supports the COM and has an Active Scripting Engine available on the system. By default, this includes VBScript and JScript. The scripts are run via an Active Scripting Host built by the Active Channel Server Channel COM object.
Active Channel Server provides front-end tools that users and administrators can use to configure the various aspects of the system. These include a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), a set of command-line utilities that run using the Windows Scripting Host (WSH), and ASP pages that can be accessed through the Web Administration tool. The MMC and Web Admin tools are designed to be fully extensible, allowing developers and users to easily make custom channel agents available for configuration through these tools.