Updated 2015-03-07 05:51:35 by RLE

ActiveX is Microsoft's marketing term for a set of software technology based on COM. When someone talks about ActiveX, they typically mean ActiveX controls [1], which are components (that may or may not have a visible representation in a GUI) that can be embedded in an application. To allow this embedding, ActiveX controls must implement specific COM interfaces. For example, a Visual Basic application may display a GUI containing widgets which are ActiveX controls. Internet Explorer can download and run an ActiveX component in the browser window (if you gave permission to install it).

Tcl extensions that support ActiveX in some way include ActiveTcl (Tcl Dev Kit, both via tcom), TclScript, Optcl, TclControl, Noel Frankinet's AxTcl (well, not really his), Joe Mistachkin's TclBridge, ...

The tcom extension provides basic COM access, and does not specifically support the COM interfaces for interacting with ActiveX controls. That is, Optcl implements and accesses the COM interfaces required for embedding ActiveX controls in Tk, while tcom does not.

AxTcl80 relates to OLE and supposedly is related to AcTcl/TclOCX.

daapp: To use ActiveX component, which draw form on screen, from tclsh (console application), need to call FreeConsole function from winapi before call ActiveX function. Checked with optcl.