The Active Scripting technologies were first released in 1996, with the release of the
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 (August 1996) and
Internet Information Services 3.0 products (December 1996). Usual applications of Active Scripting include
Active Server Pages (ASP)
server scripts,
Internet Explorer, and
Windows Script Host (WSH) scripts automating routine tasks, including use for login scripts,
Registry manipulation, and the like. Other administrative uses include Windows Management Instrumentation and Active Directory Service Interfaces. Active Scripting can also be used for general-purpose tasks such as database programming, text processing, rapid prototyping, and application macro or scripting programming. Some applications use Active Scripting as their primary automation method, while others do not have a macro facility but make the components available for use via the API; or one may opt to add a language and/or tool not available by default, like programming
Microsoft Excel in
Perl or
REXX rather than
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) or transferring data from a
terminal emulator to
word processor by way of a
spreadsheet when they have dissimilar macro tools or none at all. For many of the above uses, Active Scripting is an addition to Windows that is similar to the functionality of Unix shell scripts, as well as an incremental improvement upon batch files (command.com), Windows NT style shell scripts (cmd.exe) and, by way of
VBScript, the replacement for
QBasic, which was last available on the supplementary disc for Windows 95. The majority of the languages used for Active Scripting mentioned below are
glue languages, with
Perl being the most commonly used third-party script engine. The interfaces to Active Scripting engines are public, so any developer can create applications that are programmable in Active Scripting languages as well as engines for additional languages. == Implementations ==