Writing an IRC Client using Qt

Workshop by Alexander Færøy at The Camp in Bregninge, Denmark on July 27, 2011.

In this workshop, we wrote a small IRC client using the Qt C++ framework. The goal was to have a chat view, where textual chat messages would be displayed, and an input text field where the user could write their chat messages in and send them to the server.

The participants learned about using TLS with Qt, integrating socket operations into the main loop, protocol handling of a simple line-oriented text protocol, and slightly more advanced Qt GUI programming than in the workshop at The Camp in 2010. We implemented a subset of the RFC 1459 protocol (Internet Relay Chat).

All the participants were, in the end, able to connect to The Camp’s own IRC channel on EFnet with their home-written IRC client.

The source code for this workshop is available at Github.