My point is there are already plenty of pure web IRC clients that don't rely on a local database; none of them (that I've seen) have any sort of nice interface like this does. There are also plenty of applications that will proxy non-HTTP connections over HTTP proxies. Corkscrew [1] also allows you to tunnel SSH connections over HTTP proxy, and you can use SSH to tunnel just about anything else you need.
I'm aware there are other solutions. Compared to all the work I did to properly tunnel SSH over HTTPS (it was a pretty good firewall, apparently), deploying a node app is trivial.
