[X4U] Reasons for "Windows-only" web surveys?

[Stroller]

On 18 Nov 2006, at 14:40, Jim Robertson wrote:
> ...
> My question is this: are there things a web developer can design  
> easily
> using ActiveX that cannot be accomplished just as easily (or at  
> similar
> cost) with cross-platform tools?

The stuff I've seen usefully using ActiveX are really full Windows  
apps that happen to run in a browser window.

For instance a customer of mine bought quite a decent server last  
year, a dual-Xeon Dell with hot-swappable PSUs & SCSI RAID; it  
features a "DRAC" board (Dell Remote Access Card?) which was a £100  
option and which has it's own network port. The DRAC allows one to  
log in like VNC and view the server's "screen" (we never use a  
physical screen) even during the boot-up process (one can change BIOS  
settings when viewing the "screen" over the network) and one can also  
mount an optical drive from the viewing machine and access it on the  
server. Using these tools one can reconfigure the RAID array, format  
the disks and install an operating system over the network.

Dell have chosen to use ActiveX for at least some of the tools - I  
think other components are Java-based, but in fact Java only  
highlights the strengths of ActiveX in this situation. I think that  
the main viewer is Java based & RedHat Linux is supported, but it has  
to be a particular version of Java (1.4.2??) and certainly I have  
never been able to view the screen from Safari. I think the tool for  
network-mounting drives is ActiveX.

ActiveX is also used by the suite for remote workers shipped on  
Microsoft's Windows 2003 Server. With these tools an employee can  
open a web-browser at home, connect to the company's server, log on  
using their work username & password and use a "Remote Outlook" that  
is almost identical Outlook running on a local machine. The interface  
allows dragging & dropping, right-clicking & all that stuff. If the  
company deploys other Windows-based apps that they wish employees to  
be able to use then a terminal services (VNC-alike) session can be  
opened within the browser, so the employee effectively gets FULL  
access to his work desktop using only a web-browser. This is very  
compelling, as it's single-password, relatively easy to configure and  
can be restricted to an https:// connection; the employee has no  
software to install at home - remember running setup.exe is too  
complicated for many users - and so the IT department has no software  
to maintain off-site.

So I would say that ActiveX isn't for web-developers. It's really for  
Windows developers who want to add in remote features to their app  
for free. A web-developer, as I perceive one, writes programs that  
are specifically intended to be accessed from a web-browser - that is  
one of the main features of the program, and Perl or PHP might be a  
suitable language for writing a program of this type.

I tend to see ActiveX as an alternative to Java for writing full- 
featured applications; in this context ActiveX is just a feature of  
dot-Net, Microsoft's current version of the Visual Basic programming  
language. Substantially, you can write an office suite in either  
(Office vs Open Office) and run the program fully remotely from web- 
browser. My instinct would be to say that dot-Net / ActiveX would  
probably be easier to write & deploy than Java, but by the time  
you're getting to the stage that ActiveX is really useful then your  
project is of a size where many considerations come into play;  
ActiveX is nice because it has a very Windows-native interface, it's  
not cross-platform and that may be a disadvantage; there must be  
aspects of it and of Java of which I am unaware & which are quite  
relevant if you're deploying a number of staff for a number of months.

Certainly, however, ActiveX is unnecessary for filling out a survey  
form - best guess is that there's some survey-making tool out there,  
written in dot-Net by idiots who have taken full advantage of all the  
ActiveX shortcuts, that makes it very easy to compile & analyse sets  
of survey questions. I'd guess that purchasers of this software are  
guilty of wooly thinking when they buy it, and don't consider that 5%  
of respondents will be unable to complete the test.

Stroller.