Glowing Bear is a HTML5 web frontend for WeeChat that strives to be a modern and slick interface on top of WeeChat. It relies on WeeChat to do all the heavy lifting (connection, servers, history, etc) and then provides a few features on top of that, like content embedding (images, video) and desktop notification.
Glowing Bear uses WeeChat directly as the backend through its relay plugin, which allows us to directly connect to WeeChat from the browser using Websockets. That means that the client does not need a special "backend service", everything is provided by the IRC client itself and this frontend is written in pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
You can run Glowing Bear in multiple ways: use it like any other webpage, as a Firefox or Chrome app, a full-screen Chrome app on Android ("Add to homescreen"), and we also provide an Android app that you can install from the Google Play Store.
If you want to host the HTML application yourself, it is enough to clone it and serve the pages with a webserver. Here's a simple example using the python simple web server:
