You might want to look at a simple chatbox I built on socket.io a few weeks back: http://github.com/dpritchett/chatbox http://github.com/dpritchett/chatbox It'

You might want to look at a simple chatbox I built on socket.io a few weeks back: http://github.com/dpritchett/chatbox http://github.com/dpritchett/chatbox It's not IRC per se but it's a simple enough example of realtime chat via socket.io.