| Internet Direct | |
| Other Names: | Indy |
| Author: | Chad Z. Hower |
| Developer: | Indy Pit Crew |
| Latest Release Version: | 10 |
| Programming Language: | Object Pascal |
| Engines: | --> |
| Genre: | Library |
| Licence: | --> |
Internet Direct, also known as "Indy", is a free software / open source socket library written in Object Pascal, an object-oriented version of Pascal. It includes clients, servers, TCP, UDP, and raw sockets, as well as over 100 higher level protocols implementations such as SMTP, POP3, NNTP, and HTTP.[1] Indy includes support for OpenSSL[2] and Zlib in the protocol implementations.[3] Indy 10 was ported to Free Pascal, and runs on Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, and Darwin.[4]
Internet Direct is available for Borland Delphi, C++ Builder, and Kylix.[1] The software is dual-licensed under the "Indy Modified BSD License" and the "Indy MPL License".[5] As of early 2008, there is a new project called Indy#, which intends to write a C# version from the ground up.[6]
Indy was initially named "Winshoes" and was written by Chad Z. Hower (a.k.a. Kudzu[7]) in 1993 in Visual Basic.[8] In 1995, he ported it to Borland Delphi and deprecated the Visual Basic version. In 1997, he made it available under an open-source license. In 2000, Winshoes was renamed to Internet Direct (Indy for short) and became cross-platform. In 2001, Borland began including it as a part of Borland Delphi, C++ Builder, and Kylix. In 2003, Indy was ported to Delphi for .NET. The following year, Indy was made available to the Microsoft .NET community.