Seems like both of them require as server. Something I think means the title is misleading about. It's certainly ambiguous. I was excited to see a browser based, all client side IRC client. Oh well.
Not directly. More like TCP-like messaging over HTTP. The server needs to understand the websockets protocol.
Writing a basic server that strips the websockets part from messages and forwards them to a real TCP server isn't very hard, but it's still a server you need.
It's not really "over HTTP", it's just an HTTP handshake:
The WebSocket Protocol is an independent TCP-based protocol. Its
only relationship to HTTP is that its handshake is interpreted by
HTTP servers as an Upgrade request.
both chrome and firefox have tcp sockets apis, they are only usable in specific contexts, but you can write a web based irc client (there are a few around)
FWIW the System Applications Working Group at the W3C is working on a Raw Sockets spec for the browser, but I don't think a final draft will be ready until 2014. Adoption across most browsers will then take a little longer.
nirc is not near as feature rich as subway at first glance. There's no logging(bouncer) when you disconnect or multi users. However, you can simply open a new tab and connect to another irc server.
Also, it looks like subway has a userlist in the ui. That's something that could be added to nirc easily I think. You can still message users using the "/msg USERNAME" command.
We started customizing it and felt like it would be easier to just house the module within the app itself. None of the customizations would have made good contributions to the module for others.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway
Writing a basic server that strips the websockets part from messages and forwards them to a real TCP server isn't very hard, but it's still a server you need.
[0] http://developer.chrome.com/apps/socket.html [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/Security/TCPSocket
Also, it looks like subway has a userlist in the ui. That's something that could be added to nirc easily I think. You can still message users using the "/msg USERNAME" command.