Bukkit is dead but there is Sponge

As you may have already heard, in the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang, numerous developers for the Bukkit Minecraft server software and all of the senior staff of Bukkit have left the project. Additionally, Bukkit has been completely taken down because of a DMCA request which can be read here.



Fortunately, this does not mean the death of modded Minecraft servers. There is now a project called Sponge. The goal of Sponge is to provide a community-supported framework for modding which will be the successor to Bukkit and will have multiple improvements over Bukkit.

Sponge includes numerous interesting features. Sponge will work across several different Minecraft versions without the need for an update from the developer. This is very convenient and is welcome addition. A common issue with Minecraft mods was that if you were to try and move them to a newer version, or even a newer version which was a minor update, it would not work at all, or be extremely buggy. Sponge is trying to fix this issue which makes it very compelling to use. Sponge will also allow people with vanilla (unmodified Minecraft) clients to connect to Sponge servers without having to have Sponge or Forge installed on their computer. Sponge will also support the Minecraft client so that you will be able to enjoy Sponge mods without using multiplayer, too. There will even be mods that will be for the Minecraft client only. Sponge also will have the ability to log what players do, protect parts of the world, add minigames, etc. In Bukkit, these features required plugins to work.

Sponge will be based off of two Minecraft software projects that already exist. It will be based off of Glowstone - an independent Minecraft server written from scratch, and Forge - a well-known mod loader for Minecraft. Additionally, when Mojang releases the modding API for Minecraft, it will be able to be built off of that too. Sponge and Forge will be intercompatable which will allow for Forge mods to work with Sponge.

Although learning a new API can be difficult, the developers of Sponge say that it will be as easy to develop with Sponge as it was with Bukkit. Also, it will be possible to write mods that use both Forge and Sponge.

The Sponge project is being run by numerous significant developers in the Minecraft modding community. Such as numerous developers of Forge, Bukkit, and MCPC.

The Sponge project strives to be as open as possible to avoid such issues as the one which killed the Bukkit project.

More details can be found on the Sponge Project website.