InformationWeek

September 15, 1997

Proprietary Nature Slows Adoption Of ActiveX

Acceptance of the component technology is largely limited to intranet projects

icrosoft first announced plans to refocus its OLE Custom Controls for Internet use more than two years ago. The resulting ActiveX component technology has been slow to catch on in the Internet environment. International Data Corp.'s recent survey of 20 million Web pages found ActiveX controls on 1,000 of those pages, which comes out to 0.005%. Hardly a rousing success.

ActiveX's limited acceptance is the result of its proprietary nature. ActiveX requires clients to run 32-bit Windows, an Internet Explorer 3.0 browser, and an Internet Information Server. "Webmasters rejected ActiveX controls," says David Smith, research director for Internet strategies at Gartner Group Inc.'s office in Nashua, N.H. "ActiveX didn't take off on the Internet because it's a heterogeneous, cross-platform environment and ActiveX controls are not. Plain and simple. ActiveX controls are binary applications that can't be moved around and run on another platform like Java."

Shutting out users of Netscape Navigator, Macintosh, and Unix platforms eliminates a large portion of the Internet population. Even Microsoft's efforts to port ActiveX's underlying Component Object Model to other platforms creates binary compatibility problems, Smith adds.

That kind of lock-in is simply not a risk companies trying to do business on the Internet can afford. "When our customers want to reach their customers, they can't count on them running 32-bit Windows clients," says Richard Probst, director of marketing for Calico Technology Inc., which dev elops Java- and ActiveX-based order-processing systems used by online order takers.

One IT manager feels strongly about using Internet standards. "We don't want to limit use. We should be open to any browser," says Sam Arafeh, assistant VP for IT at Remedy Temp Inc. in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.

There's also a major security concern with ActiveX. Java applets running within a browser are crippled. They can't write to disk or access certain peripherals, which is by design. ActiveX is totally unfettered. "If I download an ActiveX component, it can do anything," says Chaz Henry, CIO for Newtonian Software Inc., a developer of sales-force automation software in Raleigh, N.C.

Newtonian has converted its sales-force software, called Sales Mechanics, to ActiveX controls, which sales representatives can download and run in a Web browser when visiting customers. Newtonian initially dabbled in Java but went with ActiveX for several reasons. One reason was that the company was fairly certain of using Windo ws 95 and Internet Explorer.

ActiveX controls have been more widely accepted in intranet development for a number of obvious reasons. First, an intranet is much more likely to be Windows-based. Remedy Temp is building three networks: a general Internet site for the public, a corporate intranet, and an extranet for clients and employees. Arafeh says the only place Remedy Temp will use ActiveX controls is the intranet, "because it's all Microsoft products, so we can control the environment."

"In the intranet space, ActiveX controls dominate," says Joe Malone, group product manager of objects at Microsoft.

Great Lakes Research and Development in Mississauga, Ontario, used ActiveX to develop the Objectstar Active Interface, a collection of five controls for interfacing a Windows client to a mainframe application. The ActiveX control constitutes the presentation layer. Great Lakes embraced a Windows solution over Java because, with 95% market penetration for Windows, that's where the money is. "The pa th has been a Microsoft path not by design, but by default," says Bruce McIssac, director of Great Lakes' large-scale virtual systems division. "We're getting into it because it's becoming profitable."

Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass., projects third-party component vendors will rack up $410 million in sales this year, mostly ActiveX controls. Last year, sales were $240 million. The market is projected to grow to $3 billion by 2001, Microsoft's Malone points out.

Boundless Trust
Trust is the second reason for ActiveX's use in intranets. An ActiveX control is capable of destroying a system. "There are no boundaries on ActiveX," says Newtonian's Henry. "So you have to know and trust the source that you download an ActiveX source from."

Another reason is ease of porting. Newtonian had originally planned to convert its Sales Mechanics software to a downloadable Java object so its customers would not have to constantly install new software. By making the software accessible via th e Internet and a browser, Newtonian eliminated the problem of software distribution. Since the company standardized on Windows PCs, ActiveX became the obvious choice for the downloadable control.

For existing code, an ActiveX port is infinitely easier, says Henry. "All our existing code is C++, and to convert it to Java requires a total rewrite," he says. "Converting it to ActiveX is a recompile with a little modification." Similarly, if an application is written in Visual Basic, Java conversion would require a complete rewrite, whereas VB5 can spawn an ActiveX control with a simple recompile.

This is also a driving factor for Remedy Temp, which has an in-house talent pool of VB developers. The company didn't want to add more language skills and people, because resources are already strained. "We chose to have a limited set of tools to work with so we don't have problems with training," says Arafeh. "We just didn't want to have a hybrid of many languages, like C++ and Java and Delphi, where we would h ave to have our people trained in all of those tools."

To get around issues of the client browser and security concerns, ActiveX controls can be run on the server, or on Active Server Pages. ASPs are dynamically generated HTML pages created by an application, which can be an ActiveX control. Because all of the processing is done on the server and spit out as HTML code, the client is no longer an issue. ASP has a distinct advantage over Java because despite Java's portability claims, there are still differences from one platform to the next. "You can write Java to run on the server, but at that point it's like CGI scripts," says Great Lakes' McIssac. "You have to adjust it when you put it on another server, whereas when you write an ActiveX control it will run on any Windows server."

The solution McIssac describes is becoming increasingly popular for developers of Web sites that perform database access, according to James Groat, president of CGK Partners Inc., a VB and database consulting firm in S anta Cruz, Calif. "People are interested in displaying database info, which is something you can do with an ActiveX control, but that way has a lot of overhead," he says. Instead of downloading a control to the browser, a query can be made to a database by a server-side application. The results are displayed in an HTML page without downloading a control or worrying about the client, says Groat. This can be helpful for less-powerful computers, especially network computers and personal digital assistants.

"There's something to be said for a database-enabled application where you don't have to download anything to the client side, especially for a PDA, where you have limited resources on the client and limited modem connections," says Groat. "You don't want to be downloading a whole bunch of stuff."

Gartner's Smith predicts that Microsoft will continue to make its products more cross-platform. "The next step is for Microsoft to do a cross-platform version of Visual Basic based on COM," he says. "That, p lus a Java development tool with a COM infrastructure has a lot more potential on the Internet than the type of ActiveX controls we find in use today."

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