ActiveX Scripting Hosts

ActiveX scripting architecture supports powerful scripting using languages such as VBScript, JScript, Perl, and others. Microsoft currently provides three hosts for running these scripting languages across the Windows platform:

Microsoft® Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer can execute scripts on client computers from within HTML pages.
Internet Information Server (IIS). IIS supports Active Server Pages, so scripts can run on Web servers. In other words, IIS supports server-side scripting over the Internet or an intranet.
Windows Scripting Host. Windows Scripting Host provides a low-memory scripting host so scripts can execute directly on the Windows desktop or Command Prompt window; the scripts do not need to be embedded in an HTML document. Windows Scripting Host is an ideal host for non-interactive scripts that perform logon and administrative tasks.

In addition to having a smaller footprint than the other two scripting hosts, the Windows Scripting Host does not rely on an HTML SCRIPT tag or LANGUAGE attribute to identify a scripting engine. Instead Windows Scripting Host uses the extension of the script file to determine which scripting engine to use. As a result, the script writer does not need to obtain a scripting engine ProgID. The scripting host itself maintains a mapping of script extensions to ProgIDs and uses the Windows association model to launch the appropriate engine for a given script.

For more information about how Windows Scripting Host works, see:: http://www.microsoft.com/management/wsh.htm.