4 ms·

ActiveX wasn't used for HTML input boxes. It was generally used for companies to leverage their existing desktop developers in a "web" context. The reason it ba

by yasth 12y ago

ActiveX wasn't used for HTML input boxes. It was generally used for companies to leverage their existing desktop developers in a "web" context. The reason it basically couldn't be ported to other platforms is because it could use all of the win32 libraries. You could literally take a desktop app, and inside of a couple days get an ActiveX "Web" App. Bad software certainly wasn't and isn't limited to activeX however. It is just bad software and can happen with a full web 2.0 singing and dancing website as any other. I've seen plenty of website dynamically load in content over other partially filled content without so much as a warning.

danudey 12y ago
In this sense, ActiveX was often used as a sort of JNLP replacement. Go to a website, click a thing, boom, app. No installing, no deploying, no upgrading. The appeal is easy to see. ActiveX gets a bad rap, but it's no worse than Java in a lot of context. The major downside is that it's Windows-only, but honestly so are a lot of Java apps (in practice, if not in design; e.g. native DLLs, OS assumptions), and in 2001 that wasn't really a huge issue for anyone. Heck, there was a JNLP-installed call centre app that we used at a previous company (in 2009) which was technically a 'java' 'web' app but used Windows-native libraries and put them into the Program Files directory. If it could. Which it often couldn't. So if you weren't an administrator (so, for example, you were a call centre employee), it would 'install' but it wouldn't 'work'. Meaning that I, as the IT guy, had to go to every computer, log in as an admin, load the program, quit the program, and log out, on every computer. So yeah, stupid mistakes aren't just limited to ActiveX, and aren't just limited to custom software built in 2002.

4 ms·

ActiveX wasn't used for HTML input boxes. It was generally used for companies to leverage their existing desktop developers in a "web" context. The reason it ba

by yasth 12y ago

danudey 12y ago
In this sense, ActiveX was often used as a sort of JNLP replacement. Go to a website, click a thing, boom, app. No installing, no deploying, no upgrading. The appeal is easy to see. ActiveX gets a bad rap, but it's no worse than Java in a lot of context. The major downside is that it's Windows-only, but honestly so are a lot of Java apps (in practice, if not in design; e.g. native DLLs, OS assumptions), and in 2001 that wasn't really a huge issue for anyone. Heck, there was a JNLP-installed call centre app that we used at a previous company (in 2009) which was technically a 'java' 'web' app but used Windows-native libraries and put them into the Program Files directory. If it could. Which it often couldn't. So if you weren't an administrator (so, for example, you were a call centre employee), it would 'install' but it wouldn't 'work'. Meaning that I, as the IT guy, had to go to every computer, log in as an admin, load the program, quit the program, and log out, on every computer. So yeah, stupid mistakes aren't just limited to ActiveX, and aren't just limited to custom software built in 2002.