This is the same slideshow you see on my homepage. I have several slideshows in my program section, all written in Java, but lately I've been trying to use non-Java technologies to broaden my horizons. Since this is a first attempt at an Active-X slideshow, it's probably not the best possible code for one, but it works, and works just as I wanted it too. Some of the Java slideshows could be improved becase they are early attempts at Java slideshows; i.e., the Active-X slideshow was easier to implement then the JApplet slideshows. JApplet uses a graphical interface called Swing, which has lots of features that I hadn't gotten into yet when I first wrote the JApplet slideshows. The slideshows I wrote using Java awt worked right the first time, but use html buttons that are hooked into the awt graphics by JavaScript. The awt applets require an IE browser because the interface between the JavaScript and the awt graphics is Active-X!
Active-X is a technology developed by Microsoft as a first attempt (I remember seeing it as a web technology in 1996) to make web pages a programmable format. There were lots of suggestions in the early days of the web on how to position images and characters on web pages (DOM objects were a suggestion of a few people back then) and how to make them interactive, but Active-X actually let you do all these things. So why didn't Active-X become the defacto standard for the web? There was a lot of Microsoft bashing back then; much worse then today (2007). The level of Microsoft bashing today is commensurate with the level of bugs found in Microsoft products, so it's not unreasonable. Back in the late 90s, Sun Microsystems claimed that Microsoft was "destroying" Java by producing J++. J++ was the Microsoft version of Java. J++ used Visual Studio as an IDE (vastly better then any other Java IDE at the time), and Active-X for communicaton with web pages. Sun's original plan for Java was to allow applets to make up their own protocol for web communication, and claimed that using Active-X subverted the design of the Java language. This actually stood up in court, and MS had to pay Sun punitive damages and had to remove the J++ JRE from IE in it's next release of Windows; XP (for years that meant the J++ JRE was still there becase people who upgraded from W2K to XP usually kept the J++ JRE).
Microsoft also made Active-X an open "standard". MS wanted other software companies to use Active-X so it would become a standard, but all those companies shunned Active-X, saying that MS was just "trying to take over the world" and everybody should fight this by using "open source" software. Sun claimed that Sun Java was "open source", and one of the reasons you shouldn't use J++ was that it was proprietary. MS actually took Sun to court over this. To be "open source", a software package must have it's source code available to all; i.e., public domain. Sun kept it's source code for Java from the general public, and hence was proprietary. Yet Sun was trying to claim J++ was proprietary because it used Actve-X, which was public domain! Sun was required by the courts to stop calling Sun Java "open source" unless they made their source code public domain; finally happened a decade later!
I could go on and on about how Active-X has been unfairly derided over the years (even post Java wars) and even about how it has been fairly derided, but enough is enough. I just want to say a few things about Active-X. Active-X is the web adaptation of COM; Component Object Model. COM defines an interface for programs, and MS just applied this to web development. For programmers this meant they were able to take greater control over web pages then what was available to them at the time with HTML. This also gave web developers a way to add interactivity to their web pages they didn't have before. CGI already existed, but this required access to the server, and the horribly slow (back then) transfer of data between the server and browser. Active-X let you build client side interactvity! Java and JavaScript, technologies that came out around the same time as Active-X, also gave developers the ability to create client side interactivity. Sun obviously saw active-X as a threat to Java, but MS was always candid about Active-X being a communication protocol and that it would work with JavaScript and Java. Active-X wasn't a competitor to Java or JavaScript.
In my Active-X slideshow, Active-X is used to create a transition effect between slides. To see how this is done you just have to view this page's source code. Viewing the source code of my home page will also work. Look for the number "12"; the transition number. There are 24 transitions available with Active-X; 0 through 23. I'm not going to list the transitions here, but you can copy this page's source code and try changing the 12 to a 0, 1, 2, ..., 23, and see what effects you get. Now you can get all those neat effects for free that you have to pay for when using a proprietary web page development package; e.g., Dreamweaver, Cold Fusion, etc.