Seamlessly Extending IRC to Mobile Devices

Jun 06, 2012 By Bill Childers  inHOW-TOs

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one of the older real-time communicationsmethods still in active use on the Internet. Due to its popularity,flexibility and cross-platform nature, it still has a very vibrant userbase today. Personally, I've been on IRC since the late 1990s, and it'sbeen very useful and lots of fun—particularly the #linuxjournal roomon Freenode—stop in sometime!

Drawbacks to IRC

As great as IRC can be, there's one thing about it that's always botheredme, and it's something that Jabber got right—the concept of a resourceand priority. In IRC, when you log in as whatever user you are, you can'tlog in as that user again from another machine. Jabber allows multipleuser logins, so long as the "resource" is different, and it'll routeyour messages to the client with the lowest priority. IRC doesn't evenhave that concept, so once you log in on your desktop, you have to log inas another user if you want to log in on your laptop, which results inlots of logins like "WildBill

View the Original article