I suppose it's only a matter of time before one of these persistent web clients / services converts me, but my current setup works surprisingly well:<p>- Irssi + screen on my server.<p>- IrssiNotifier [1] for push notifications to my Android phone when I'm hilighted/PM'd.<p>- Connect from my phone using Irssi ConnectBot [2], which is just an SSH client that supports gestures for interacting with Irssi (swipe left/right to switch channels, double tap to go to a hilight, swipe up/down to scroll the channel log, etc).<p>- Connection via mosh [3] instead of plain SSH. Mosh uses UDP, which allows persistent connections when switching from Wi-Fi to cellular data, or when data connections are spotty, etc. On my phone, I actually use a patched version of Irssi ConnectBot [4] which supports mosh.<p>That said, as well as this works, I've always kept an envious eye on browser-based implementations like this. I love thinking about all the fun integrations that would be possible to make IRC a much more rich experience: automatically showing YouTube thumbnails/descriptions, expanding shortened links, hover-to-show image links, etc.<p>[1]: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.iki.murgo.irssinotifier&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.iki.murgo.i...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.woltage.irssiconnectbot&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.woltage.ir...</a>
[3]: <a href="http://mosh.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://mosh.mit.edu/</a>
[4]: <a href="http://dan.drown.org/android/mosh/" rel="nofollow">http://dan.drown.org/android/mosh/</a>
I had fun a year or so ago messing around with a web based IRC client. I never got around to adding bouncer like functionality or a few other key pieces that would make it my everyday IRC client. A few key pieces lacking in my project are: auto complete nicks, auto reconnect when connection is lost, etc. But it was fun and thats why I did it, cool project and good luck keeping it going!<p>My project is in node.js: <a href="https://github.com/cjstewart88/nirc" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cjstewart88/nirc</a>
So... an open-source, self-hosted version of IRCCloud, with the server written in Perl?<p>I'm a bit too happy with IRCCloud to switch, so I'm not really in the target audience. Still, I don't run across Perl projects too often these days; nice to see some variety. :)
Nice! I had been thinking about making something similar. There are very few quality web IRC clients out there. I had a chromebook for a while, and I was stuck using Mibbit which is pretty terrible.