What is ActiveX®?
ActiveX® is a set of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) technologies created by Microsoft®. It enables software applications to share functionality and information. An ActiveX® object is a self sufficient program that works only on Windows® operating systems. ActiveX® was created to ensure that different applications shared the same functions. The best example of this is the spell checker ActiveX® object. Instead of writing two separate programs for the spell checker, a single spell checker object was built to ensure that its functionality is shared among different Microsoft® applications like Word and PowerPoint. The ActiveX® technology evolved in the form of object linking and embedding (OLE). OLE allowed simple functions like cut and paste to be shared among different applications. It later evolved into the idea of the compound object module (COM). Independent modules and applets like the spell checker are COMs or ActiveX® objects that can be accessed from a Windows® application. An
