Contents
I had a request on IRC (from Mic) to write an in-depth blog post about IRC in JavaScript:
“Maybe we could ask clokep if he’d like to write something about js-irc? Why it is done, what the advantages are once it’s done, how he is working on it (going through the specs), putting the jsProtocol code to test and adding missing pieces?” — Mic
I guess this is a good first question, I’ll steal from Wikipedia:
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time […] chat […] It is mainly designed for group communication […] but also allows […for…] private message as well as chat and data transfers.
Awesome, what’s that really mean? It’s an instant messaging protocol with an actual specification (i.e. it’s not owned by some large, unnamed company), with open-source libraries for clients and servers. It’s usually used by more computer-oriented types of people and centers around group conversation. Personally most of what I use it for is open-source software I use (I’m almost always in #instantbird, #maildev, and #songbird on Mozilla’s IRC servers.)
I touched upon this a little in my last post. In terms of Instantbird: there’s an idea of switching some / all of the protocols (eventually) to be JavaScript protocols instead of the libpurple versions (libpurple is written mostly in C and is cross-platform, but recent gains in speed in JavaScript allow this advantage of libpurple to not matter as much). This would unfortunately mean we need to maintain a lot more code, but it would allow us to integrate protocols in any way that we see fit, instead of only using APIs / methods provided by libpurple. Hopefully this would allow us to enhance our IRC implementation a bit.
Also, Instantbird (nightlies) currently have limited support for generating a protocol plug-in in JavaScript. A couple of “test” protocols have be done, but nothing in “real” (in particular, none that used a multi-user chat). This would allow us to iron out some bugs in the implementation of JavaScript protocols.
[Edit: Florian suggested another question that wasn’t originally covered, which some people more familiar with Mozilla code might be wondering.]
This was a tough one. Honestly when I first wanted a parsing algorithm, I looked at the ChatZilla code, I used it. Then rewrote it in a fourth as many lines (93 vs. 20). Simply said, the code in ChatZilla is old, it doesn’t use many of the features available only in newer versions of JavaScript. To that point, the ChatZilla code hasn’t been updated in over a year! The last check-in was: 2009-10-03, below is a quick summary of the number of check-ins per year:
There’s been a pretty steady decline in check-ins. I could take this code and attempt to whip it into shape and make huge sweeping changes and commit them back to ChatZilla, but honestly it was easier to start over for me. Regardless of ease, I’m not sure it would work any: especially since the ChatZilla code seems overly complicated and overly specific (since it wasn’t really built as a library as far as I can see), especially since all the code is meant to deal only with IRC. The Instantbird code needs to be protocol agnostic to a degree, while is why it interfaces to purplexpcom.
A quick example of this is: ChatZilla uses a CIRCUser object, but for Instantbird I need to create either an imIContact or a purpleIAccountBuddy (depending on the situation). It’s possible that’s can be abstracted and code shared — but I’m not sure it would be worth the effort. After all this, I should probably look more into the ChatZilla code, perhaps more of it could be used.
(If someone familiar with the ChatZilla code base — I don’t know who/if there’s a maintainer — is interested in talking with me, please get in contact here or on #instantbird. It’s possible we could align some of what I’ve been working on, but I’m not sure how much could be shared besides the parsing algorithm).
[End edit]
In terms of the IRC protocol itself, there shouldn’t be any, my goal is for it to be a drop in replacement for the libpurple implementation with automatic account migration, etc. For end-users we can hopefully solve a few annoying IRC UI issues.
Well, I’m hoping to be able to test this replacement via an extension that replaces the libpurple IRC to dogfood it before eventual inclusion in Instantbird. I’m not sure if that counts as “cool.” though. If nothing else there will be an example of how to write a protocol in JavaScript (using sockets). So hopefully other people can make some other cool protocols off of that example. You might wonder what else we have planned for JavaScript protocols; there are plans to make at least a Twitter protocol.
Well I said up above IRC has a specification, right? Well, yes. There’s the original specification, this was superseded by four different specification documents. Of which we only really care about one: the client protocol. So we have this updated specification (try reading it, it’s rather painful), which is good. It’s relatively straightforward set of commands and responses/errors. It’s a bit more confusing than that though since there are a couple of extensions, etc. This is summarized below:
A lot of this is being done by reading the specifications and finding the proper responses, etc. I’ve also used Wireshark a bit to see how libpurple sends IRC commands (in particular, in what order it sends them in). A lot of my development is happening on live IRC servers, which isn’t really best practice, but I’m mostly sending commands by hand to see the responses since a bunch of non-standard responses and extensions have developed beyond the above. I have been using beware irc to run a daemon on my own machine, however.
I’ve started implementing RFC 2812 and have a variety of commands done (the login sequence occurs automatically, the server connection is kept alive, messages can be sent to a channel and are parsed when received, a lot of the initial server information is displayed but unparsed). But there’s a lot more to do! As my last post outlined, I recently was able to successfully get a chat to work in Instantbird from a silly bug I had been having.
It’s rather slow going since I’ll start to implement something from the IRC side, and then realize the Instantbird layer (the jsProtocol module) is missing a component I need. One of the major parts of working on this is extending the Instantbird layer to contain the proper functions and objects needed to implement chats via JavaScript. This is usually the slowest going part of my code, since it involves interfacing with Instantbird / purplexpcom. Luckily Florian, the main developer of Instantbird, has been a big help with this (as have other participants of #instantbird — in particular I know Mic helped track down a few syntax type bugs).
Now that have the basics of chat working, I need to start handling the QUIT, PART and JOIN commands for when other users enter & leave chat rooms. Once these are complete it should be quite usable, although the entire preference system still doesn’t exist, including notifying the UI of what options are available. In addition, I need to look into doing SSL sockets.
Once the protocol plug-in is done, we plan to abstract sections of it that will be useful for other protocols (in particular the socket connection aspects).
My work is kept in the “experiments” repository on Instantbird’s Mercurial repository. There’s also a variety of bugs open (they’re listed above, I’m not going to re-list them), although not a ton is happening in them.
Well you can of course feel free to download the code and hack on it, let me know (via IRC or any of the bugs most likely) if you have a patch you’d like me to apply. Or if you just found something that doesn’t work you can feel free to let me know, although I probably just haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.
Also, if you’ve ever found something annoying / broken in the IRC implementation in Instantbird / libpurple please let us know (through any of the above contact sources).
Hopefully that’s a bit of a better explanation of why we’re spending time to rewrite the IRC protocol implementation into JavaScript — we definitely think it’s worth it and can lead to a bunch of new unique protocol plug-ins for Instantbird.