XChat allows Perl scripting too (altho the docs on it are really old). I released a few scripts for it and currently use a DBI powered one for info stuff, line counting, karma etc.
Greetz
Beatnik
...Perl is like sex: if you're doing it wrong, there's no fun to it.
I have used xchat some years ago. Although it's the nicest GUI client I've ever seen, I like irssi better. And besides, it's quite hard to keep a graphical client running remotely if your own connection is unstable. It'd probably require Xvnc, but X is too heavy for this purpose (and this particular machine...).
My irssi based bot uses DBI (for pulling user information from Cu2, a reasonably large Dutch website) too, and keeps track of karma (heh, could we live without?). It also acts as a calculator and provides train schedule information. The old version was a bunch of elsifs, now I can extend it very easily.
Actually XChat also has a text version (console based that is) so you dont really need VNC. Perl scripts work equally well in that version since it's just a text based front-end instead of a X based one.
Greetz
Beatnik
...Perl is like sex: if you're doing it wrong, there's no fun to it.