In my quest to learn Cocoa, I’ve been writing an IRC client. Initially, the IRC communications code was rolled by myself, but I was unhappy with the amount of work it was going to take to support all of the different events properly, as well as writing robust parsers.

Avoiding reinventing the wheel, I did some searching for a Cocoa framework that did what I needed. There is ChatCore, of course, developed by the Colloquy people. It’s … ok, I guess, but rather complicated, being based on irssi. I wanted something a little cleaner.

I eventually settled on the wonderful libircclient by Georgy Yunaev, which is a C event driven library that supports multithreading. I then started writing a comprehensive cocoa wrapper around this library, to make it easier to integrate into your typical IRC client. In the course of writing the IRCClient framework, I must have fixed enough bugs to make Georgy happy to give me committer access. As a result, the completed IRCClient framework is now a part of libircclient and free for any use under the LGPL.

I haven’t figured out how to release files yet, so here it is: ircclientframework-10

The framework is documented on the libircclient site, and should be fairly straightforward to use. As usual, please file any bugs you find in the sourceforge project.

The framework has been built to support both PPC and Intel, but let me know if there are any portability problems.