How can you make a website (that is, "a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address") think that mIRC is a client, without mIRC being a client?

Websites aren't servers. They don't relay information, though code within them can be used to generate information dynamically. Servers don't think about whether this client is a browser, because they already know it's a client. A client, however, needn't implement javascript to be a client, and a server (or website, in this case) needn't particularly care about whether a client implements javascript or not. Facebook is an extremely dynamic website, and it relies on AJAX among other concepts. Sure, it's possible to write a HTTP client in mIRC (no need to make the server 'think' it's a client, because it is one), but there is alot more work than you might have thought. Logging into facebook is easy enough, but practically everything else relies upon javascript, and page structure can vary quite dramatically, from user to user. Keep in mind, you're thinking specifically about sockets, where as I'm thinking about the problem he's facing: implementation beyond sockets. Sure, you can use sockets for this, but rewriting a javascript interpreter in mIRC so that you can parse content would be stupid.

In summary, don't use mIRC solely for this. Get a library that's already written to do this, such as the libraries you can obtain when you compile firefox. Write a wrapper for it, and use that to login, or use mIRC sockets to get the data and the libraries to parse it. That might take hours (if you know what to do) instead of days or weeks (if you know what to do). edit: Alternatively, you could port the facebook application API to mIRC and use XML feeds.

Last edited by s00p; 10/11/09 08:49 AM.