Python Programming On Win32

Chapter 21. Active Scripting

Active Scripting is a COM-based technology from Microsoft that allows applications to plug in different languages for macros or scripting. Rather than force the application to choose a single scripting language, end users of the application can pick the language they’re most comfortable with. The application need not know anything specific about the scripting language; indeed, the language may have been written (or support for Active Scripting added) after the application was written.

The best examples of this technology are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Internet Information Server (IIS). IE supports client-side scripting; an HTML file can have script code embedded in it in any language, and when the browser displays the page, it executes the code. Hence the term client-side scripting: the script code is actually executed on the client PC, the PC with the browser. IIS includes a component called Active Server Pages (ASP) that supports active scripting. Similar to IE, the code is embedded inside HTML files, but ASP executes the code at the server before it’s converted to the final HTML sent to the client.

Many Microsoft applications are starting to support Active Scripting. These applications typically come standard with VBScript and JScript^[1] language implementations, and all documentation and sample code use one of these languages. In fact, many users of these applications (IE and IIS users included) aren’t aware you can use additional languages ...