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Sockets in Async Professional

Async Professional includes a device layer, dlWnsock, that utilizes Winsock for network and Internet communications.

The Async Professional implementation of Winsock consists of two components. TApdWinsockPort is a component that replaces the TApdComPort component and can be placed on a form at design time. TApdWinsockPort includes properties to allow you to set the network address, the port number, and the mode of the socket (server mode or client mode).

TApdWinsockPort is derived from TApdCustomComPort and therefore inherits all of its properties and methods. Many of these properties and methods are not applicable to TApdWinsockPort when operating in Winsock mode, but are retained in the descendent component so that TApdWinsockPort behaves exactly like TApdComPort when the DeviceLayer property is not set to dlWinsock. The properties and methods that do not apply to Winsock operation (e.g., Baud, DataBits, Parity, and StopBits) are simply ignored when DeviceLayer is set to dlWinsock. Certain Async Professional components (e.g., the modem and TAPI components) are not applicable when using the dlWinsock device layer. Faxing over the Internet is not supported because Internet faxing uses a different protocol than faxmodems.

TApdSocket is a low-level component that provides access to most standard Winsock services. This component is used internally by Async Professional. A global instance of this component, ApdSocket, is created for use by the Winsock device layer in the initialization code of the AwWnsock unit. In most cases you won’t need to, but you can create your own instance of this class.

The Winsock support in Async Professional is not intended as a full-featured Winsock implementation. Rather, it is intended to allow you to perform basic communications operations over local networks or over the Internet. Certain concessions were made (such as allowing only one client connection to a server socket) to allow the Winsock implementation to fit into the existing Async Professional communications model.

This document maintained by the Async Professional Project.