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As Microsoft makes a big push for ActiveX this week, developers, Web entrepreneurs and analysts are wondering whether the fledgling multimedia technology will live up to its hype. Fearful of being left out of the global software conglomerate's sphere of influence, Internet tool companies and Web-content creators are scrambling to produce ActiveX controls.
Surf Logic, a San Francisco-based start-up creating intelligent retrieval agents for various Internet applications, including off-line browsing and bookmark monitoring, is jumping on the bandwagon and developing ActiveX controls.
"ActiveX gives us a framework to plug our components into a number of applications and make them generally more useful," said company president Kirk Scott. "Our customers are asking for this kind of functionality."
He noted, "Having one big rich set of pre-built stuff that Windows provides allows us to build applications that are faster and smaller and are already part of the operating system."
Ease of Use
Ease of use clearly will be a key to the rapid adoption of ActiveX, according to Perry Evans, president of MapQuest, a Web-based service that combines interactive maps with business directories. "The productivity of a Windows developer on ActiveX is very high," Evans said. "It's very easy for us to build ActiveX applets with talent we have from existing things we're doing."
Evans added, "The learning curve on ActiveX is much shorter than the learning curve on Java."
Deciding between the industry-embraced Java and up-start ActiveX has not been difficult for some developers, who, though publicly supportive of Sun Microsystems' programming language, privately see ActiveX as a much more versatile...