ActiveX over the web problem....

I have a good question for everyone.

What's the best way to send and receive data with an ActiveX control used in a ASP or HTML page?

I'm used to controls in applications, so you can use events and properties to send it data and send back data, this is easy, but when it comes to web, I was almost having a headache doing it.

The problem is easy when you have an ActiveX receiving small data, such as ftp login/password and sending you an event when you're done. But now I have to do a complete ActiveX receiving a lot of data and sending the data back once it's modified.

Discussing with people, the best way we found to do this is to use an ASP page to generate an XML output which the control read, then we POST the data via an html form to another ASP page on the server.

This works, but I don't feel that confident with the result, it's not easy to secure everything so you can be sure nobody can hack you, or send false data and everything. I would prefer to see the control do everything without the use of "3rd party" ASP pages.

So the other idea would be a service running on a server and having the control connect to this service via Winsock and exchanging data.. it would be more or less secure to do this, we can use encryption and passwords to protect our tcp port of abuse from the outside.. but again, then you have to do another application running as a service on a server able to talk to your database server. I would prefer this solution, but if somebody uses your control from a place using a firewall, he won't be able to send data this way.

So you can see all my "problems" with this. I'm pretty sure people have done this before, so I'm looking for experience and ways we can deal with this.

Thank you very much.