What is the difference between ASTA 2.6 and AstaIO?
Asta 2.6 uses Borland Windows Sockets for transport. AstaIO has an abstracted transport layer employing interfaces which allow any type of transport to be used. Currently, all the examples use an AstaNative Transport, which are sockets written from the ground up, to the WinSock API on Windows and the Linux API on Linux. Since Linux uses blocking sockets, AstaNative Sockets are also blocking. We will also provide examples using Indy, dxSocks, IPworks, and ICS as well as an example using shared memory or Delphi Strings. This means that a client and server can be compiled in the same executable with virtually no performance hit and no need for tcp/ip to be installed. By allowing other transports to be used, support for SOCKS and HTTP tunneling can be used by the transport component rather than AstaIO itself. The AstaNative Transport already provides this support. The basic design of AstaIO and Asta 2.6 is similar, both having a messaging layer and a database layer. Asta 2.6 has many prope
