Chapter 18 Jaguar ActiveX Overview

Overview

ActiveX/COM is a Microsoft component technology. Many IDE tools such as Visual Basic allow you to create ActiveX components and write code to call methods in registered ActiveX components.

Any nonvisual ActiveX component can be installed as a Jaguar component (though you may need to define an "adaptor," or wrapper class to handle methods that use unsupported parameter datatypes). Jaguar uses COM and ActiveX automation support to execute ActiveX component methods. Consequently, all Jaguar ActiveX components must support COM's automation interface (the IDispatch interface). Many application development tools, such as Microsoft Visual Basic, can be used to create ActiveX components that are compatible with Jaguar. Once installed in Jaguar, ActiveX components can be called by clients of any type.

To support ActiveX clients, Jaguar provides an ActiveX automation server that interacts with the Jaguar server using the C++ CORBA ORB and standard CORBA IIOP. Because ActiveX clients use IIOP rather than the DCOM network protocol, they can call Jaguar components of any type and interact with servers running on platforms that do not support ActiveX.

No client managed transactions This release does not provide an ActiveX client interface to manage transactions. Consequently, ActiveX clients cannot call component methods that have the Mandatory transaction attribute.