Active port forwarder is a software tool for secure Port Forwarding. It uses SSL to increase security of communication Between a server and a client. Originally, it was developed to forward data point to point. However, the need for bypassing firewalls in order to Connect to internally located computers influenced the further development of the project.
AF is dedicated for people, who don't have an external IP number and want to make some services available across the net.
Moreover, zlib is used to compress the transferred data.
Using one, permanent data/control channel with flow control / packet buffering provides good performance and reasonably small latency.
Running afserver does not require root priviledges, nor does it use Threads or other processes.