This provides a simple java applet to participate in an irc chat. It needs a running irc server on the same machine as the web server due to java applet net connection restrictions.
Install the package on your system and mount a new instance somewhere on the site map, e.g. under '/chat/'.
Make sure an irc server is running on your web server. Java applets are normally only allowed to connect to the same server they were downloaded from, so it won't work using an irc server on another machine unfortunately.
The package uses the first name and last name or screen name of the currently logged in user as nickname in the chat. If the user is not logged in than it allows to freely select one. There is no checking wether a nickname conforms to a user account.
Alternatively to installing your own irc server you can use
port forwarding to redirect the client connections to an
existing irc server. For example rinetd
(available as debian package) is a comfortable way to set that
up. Add a line like this to your rinetd.conf:
# bindadress bindport connectaddress connectport
mywebserverip 6667 existing_irc_server_ip 6667
To clients connecting to your server it will appear as if
there is an irc server running on it. Note however that it
most likely won't work to forward to public irc servers
because they limit the number of connections from the same ip
and the forwarded connections all originate from the same ip.
This package uses the nice Jicra java applet by Tommi Leino. http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/jicra/jicra. It includes a patch to make connections from non-applet clients appear in the users list. That patch should be included in the latest cvs version of jicra.
You can change the channel that the applet joins in the packages' parameter section. By default it will generate one from the system name.