Keep or Toss: Is ActiveX Dead?

Opinion on ActiveX varies. Some say ActiveX is dead, passé, an old technology with no future relevance. Others say that so much has been invested in ActiveX that it is economically infeasible to adapt to newer technologies such as .NET, RIA, JavaScript and HTML5. 

I say that the beauty of the Magic xpa Application Platform is that it is economically feasible to adapt to these newer technologies. And well, yeah, if you don’t want to then you don’t have to because you can wrap your ActiveX.

Having said this, my recommendation is to leave ActiveX behind in favor of new RIA clients. You don’t have to abandon ActiveX, but you should, and you will still be using 100% of your core business application logic.  

Trying to keep ActiveX in today’s modern operating system environments is kind of like trying to preserve a function key interface on an iPhone. Yeah, you could do it by creating graphical representations of F1, F2, F3, F4 and yes the holy F5 key on the touchscreen of the iPhone, but why? 

There is a better future and it’s already here. Reluctance to change is a natural human reaction and it seems to increase in some people as we grow older. But the beauty of our tradition in the Magic community has always been that it is easy to adapt to new technology paradigms with Magic xpa Application Platform. A metadata driven platform makes it easier to transition to the newer fully .NET native Magic xpa Application Platform. 

Because let’s not forget: the road to .NET is Magic!