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pix0r
Very cool, quick and responsive.

I'm curious if you could use websockets to connect directly to an irc server rather than going through your perl backend?

pix0r
Read a little on web sockets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket) - it sounds like the server is required to speak HTTP for the initial handshake, so connecting directly to an IRC server would not work.
a-priori
No, you need a server that speaks HTTP, at least minimally. This is by design so an XSS attack can't connect to arbitrary servers.

However, you could very easily create a simple adapter that accepts Websocket connections and relays the data to a TCP server.

james2vegas
You could add code to your ircd to recognize it is being spoken to in a websockets way and speak the necessary HTTP voodoo to make it work.
jrockway
Depends on the IRC server. Freenode's old IRC daemon was very liberal about the IRC protocol. If you "accidentally" included "POST /whatever HTTP/1.1" before the IRC commands, the server would be just fine with that. You could also send commands without acknowledging responses. This meant that an arbitrary HTTP request could create an IRC connection and send stuff to channels!

The result was a web page that merely visiting would spam people on the IRC network with hate messages from your IP. It was amusing.

icefox
Does it really need to have a window manager?
elblanco
It was almost awesome until I noticed none of the / commands work.
xantus
It has /join /part /nick /quit /msg /quote

Thats a lot more than none. It's also an example.

xantus
The load avg on that machine hasn't gone above .01 :)