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We use a Perl Bot for this. It will uses POE-Components to connect to the IRC and to the XMPP and then dispatches the messages to one from the other.

If you are interested, just join us on IRC and we talk about it :)

A friend did this: https://gitorious.org/irctk ("irctk is a general-purpose IRC wrapper written in C with libircclient"). I think it could be pretty straightforward to do the job using it.

We prefer Perl, cause we got one solution for everything and can easily combine the thousands components offered. Just cause a lib does IRC doesnt help us much :-) It must be easy! :)

XMPP has a concept of transports, that are gateways to other networks. Gateways exists for MSN, ICQ, AIM and IRC.

And to answer your question, taka a look at

http://xmpppy.sourceforge.net/irc/

At one of my internships they had written a simple server in Java to bridge XMPP and IRC. Sounds like it's been re-invented a few times.