Does Delphi XE2 FireMonkey support Indy for cross-platform apps?

Question

Looking at the new Delphi XE2 with Firemonkey. Considering that it compiles for Windows, Mac OSX and iOS, VCL components are useless in a FireMonkey application.

My question is: Is there/will there be an Indy Firemonkey Edition? Cause I seriously need the IdHTTP.Post();. If not, is there a way to do this in FireMonkey?

I have been googling for quite awhile now, not finding anything. :S

Answer 1

VCL means Visual Component Library. There's nothing about Indy that is "visual" (meaning "seen at runtime"), meaning that "VCL components are useless in a FireMonkey application" has no relevance to Indy.

You can create a new FireMonkey HD application in Delphi XE2, target OS X, and the Indy component pages are still available in the IDE, meaning that they are compatible with supported FireMonkey cross-platform targets. They're also available for FireMonkey HD Windows targets (32 and 64 bit).

Answer 2

Indy ships with the IDE (and has since D6) so there is nothing extra to buy if you already have XE2 installed. Also, Indy is open-source, so you can upgrade an Indy installation using source code from Indy's public access SVN server or mirror.

Regarding FireMonkey, Indy does work in FireMonkey. Indy uses whatever the native socket API is on a given platform (WinSock on Windows, Posix on Mac, libc on Kylix, etc).

The only known gotcha with Indy under FireMonkey at the moment is the TIdAntiFreeze component is not available at design-time. The IDE cannot resolve it correctly due to the non-standard way it is packaged (to be adressed in Indy 11). You can instantiate it programmably in code at run-time, though.