OrtzIRC Update
September 28th, 2008
Progress has been slow, but it hasn’t stopped. It’s been a while since the last update so forgive me if I repeat anything.
The biggest news to tell is probably FlamingIRC. I decided pretty early on that there was no need to reinvent the wheel and so decided against writing my own IRC lib. So I went with what seemed to be the most popular IRC library for .NET, Thresher. After having it pointed out to me how old and outdated the code for Thresher was (I think it was written for the first version of .NET) I decided to fork it and name it FlamingIRC. Sadly it’s under the GPL so it has to stay that way. I hate how viral GPL is. It’s very heavy-handed.
Max Schmeling sort of gave OrtzIRC a shot of adrenaline, cleaning up some of my code and improving a lot of things overall. I just wish I could code as fast as him…
I’m still thinking about features to add, mainly plugins and scripting. I’ve been thinking that both a plugin system and a scripting system would be over kill, but that seems to be how XChat does it so I’ll have to do some more research. If you have any experience with implementing plugin systems and/or scripting systems or know where I can get some information on implementing them, please leave a comment!
I don’t think I’ve linked to the project page yet, so here you go. You can take a look at the code if you want but there really isn’t anything to see yet. However if you do happen to see any bugs, or if you have any feature requests feel free to open an issue. I also started a page on planned features, mostly for my reference., which is obviously subject to frequent change.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:59 am
A couple more years and you’ll be knockin’ out code faster than me.
I don’t remember if I’ve pointed this out to you before or not, but divil has some good articles on developing a plug-in/scripting system for your application. They’re old (written for earlier version of the framework) and introductory, but they’re a good place to start. Here’s the link: http://divil.co.uk/net/articles/
I think having both a plug-in and scripting system is a good idea as long as you make the scripting quick and painless to use. They can both work off the same base system, but the scripting one will just compile the code at run-time rather than loading an assembly.
Also, don’t forgot to allow for plug-ins that want to modify the UI, and not just interact with the server/channel objects.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:02 am
Also, I thought I should add this. You should try to make your scripting/plug-in system powerful enough that you can implement a lot of the out-of-the-box features in scripts. This way power users can not only add new functionality, but they can tweak bits and pieces of existing functionality to meet their needs and wants.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:47 pm
You did show me those but I forgot. Thanks.