Best way to embed an IRC client in a webpage

Question

I'm looking for a good, free, preferrably open source, IRC client to be embedded in a web page.

The obvious requirements of supporting most browsers, if requiering a plug-in it should be a plug-in that is allready widley deployed and it should not put too much strain on the webserver serving the page.

Answer 1

A commonly used open source platform is QwebIRC. In python with a javascript frontend, but has all sorts of packaging issues. KiwiIRC seems really interesting but I haven't tried it yet so I can't vouch for it. KiwiIRC is all javascript. Both can be embeded in an iframe or something similar.

Answer 2

An iframe can be embedded. http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=channel_name

Answer 3

I assume a java applet would pass the multiplatform / Browser requirement ?

Pjirc Its not one ive used personally, but i have seen a fair few sites using it.

Answer 4

I have seen these before, but I have never really liked them. I think the best overall one was Mibbit. I think the best way to go about it would be to ask the user to install a client and use the irc:// linking syntax to launch a native client.

Answer 5

Not really a programming question, but Mibbit is quite capable, I've used it for a few different applications, it's always worked well.

Note that it will work best if your channel is on one of the networks listed here that support WEBIRC.