Writing a bot for college credit

[jab630]

My friend and I are doing an independent study with the goal of designing a really smart poker bot. This is for academic purposes only. We are not looking to write a bot that can play on sites like partypoker. Rather, we are looking for a bot-friendly online poker medium that provides a dealer and an interface that would be easy for a bot to use (i.e. text-based). That way we could concentrate on the interesting part (playing good poker) rather than waste time writing our own server and interface. IRC poker would have been ideal, but apparently it's been defunct for some time now. Does anyone know if anything has emerged to replace it?
Thanks,
Josh