I am looking for a simple method of zipping and compressing with delphi. I have already looked at the components at torry delphi:http://www.torry.net/pages.php?s=99. They all seem as though they would accomplish what I want however a few disadvantages to using them is that none of them run in delphi 2009 and are very complex which makes it difficult for me to port them to delphi 2009. And besides, the documentation on them is scarce, well at least to me. I need basic zipping functionality without the overhead of using a bunch of DLLs. My quest lead me to FSCTL_SET_COMPRESSION which I thought would have settled the issue but unfortunately this too did not work. CREATEFILE looked promising, until I tried it yielded the same result as FSCTL_SET... I know that there are some limited native zipping capability on windows. For instance if one right clicks a file or folder and selects -> sendTo ->zipped folder, a zipped archive is smartly created. I think if I was able to access that capability from delphi it will be a solution. On a side issue, does linux have its own native zipping functions that can be used similar to this?
TurboPower's excellent Abbrevia can be downloaded for D2009 here, D2010 support is underway and already available in svn according to their forum.
Abbrevia used to be a commercial (for $$$) product, which means that the documentation is quite complete.