Indy, ICS or Synapse?

This is a common question hanging around the various Delphi groups in the world.

I don't think to have the definitive answer, but I just want to point out a few things about
them: try using TIdHTTP to download files subject to redirection. You'll see that it ain't that
easy.

ICS, instead, does the job extremely well and reliably.

Though, Indy is a full blown component set and that's obvious that the larger a project
grows, the higher is the chance to find something not really working as expected.

Plus, most of the bugs you can find in Indy are likely to be there for slightly "exotic"
situations, that means on plain standard ones it behaves well enough( at least for me ).

Now, ICS is less "flooded" with protocols/tools/whatalike, so that may be an issue, especially if
someone isn't really into socket programming. I've been told, though, that things are changing.
I have no reasons as to now to beleive this isn't true.

Synapses is not a set of components, but a set of classes. This has several advantages and
drawbacks. First of all, its footprint is *way* smaller than ICS or Indy. Thus, if this is an
issue, you may very well want to give it a try.
Since it's not component based, adding event handlers isn't exactly a chill, especially if we're
talking of *many* events.
It lacks the richness of Indy and I think its classes are extremely useful particularly under two
circumstances:

1) RAW Api programs
2) DLLs

In the above scenarios, I think Synapses is close to unbeatable.

Now, what to choose? It really depends on you, I guess.

I mostly use Indy, but I'll be posting on Synapses as soon as I'll have some time to
delve through it thoroughlly and have a couple of projects done with it.

Thus, I'll keep you posted on this.