So in a slight twist of irony since my last post about working on PopTrayU, after all the trouble of getting Indy 9 set up on my current machine, I’ve decided to port PopTrayU from Indy 9 to Indy 10.
For those of you unfamiliar with Indy (which is probably pretty much everyone who is not an experienced Delphi developer), Indy is an open source networking library that is available both for .NET and Delphi platforms. It does most of the heavy lifting as far as the technical implementation of connecting to a POP3 server, downloading and parsing the email headers (though I had to override a few little pieces of that to workaround Delphi 7 international character support issues) and that sort of stuff.
Version 9 is, well, a legacy version at this point. You can’t escape being asked “why are you still using Indy 9 anyhow?” if you ask a question pertaining to it on a programming forum. Version 10 has a lot of new features, and performance improvements and so forth. But, they made a lot of changes to the interfaces, so it’s not like you can just download version 10, and your code for version 9 will just work without changes.
I’d already done the vast majority of the porting to version 10 legwork when I was working on my Lazarus port, so there were only a few holes (“todos”) here and there that needed to be fixed. It was probably more painful to actually do enough research/reading to even figure out how to get versions 9 and 10 “somewhat” concurrently installed in delphi (to the degree that’s possible), than it was to makde PopTrayU built on Indy 10 itself work.
But I’ve been holding off on releasing these changes as the next version, because aside from wanting to make sure it’s stable and not buggy, it introduces the first change to the plugin interface since branching from PopTray that will make certain older plugins no longer compatible. I’ll write more about those changes in my next post 😉