What I think of Sponge

Disclaimer: I have 5 years of Java experience, and this is only my personal opinion on Sponge. There may be some bias on my behalf, but I do my best not to be biased in this.

Sponge seems like a promising API and a plausible successor to Bukkit. The servers of minecraft are what keeps minecraft alive today. So, it makes sense to even start a company or organization just for that reason. You could be successful by doing that.

I digress. From what I've glanced in Sponge, there are some key points I would like to address:

1. Sponge uses a lot of abstractions.

I see many wrapper classes in this API. If you are going to make an API for the client and just wrap already existing classes so that it is compatible with your API and suitable to send over a server, then you might as well just implement your wrapper classes in forge and make a pull request. Interfaces are not the way to do this. It's hard to find an API for minecraft that still keeps OOP in mind. For instance, Bukkit. It was excellent for servers, but very limited, and for the simple reason that it wasn't OOP. Had it's objects been actual classes instead of interfaces that represent the real objects, you could have done much more with bukkit than you could before, such as custom blocks, items, and entities without a vanilla client needing to download anything, except perhaps the textures. That would be similar to how Team Fortress 2 servers work, which basically you can spray a custom image somewhere on the map, and the image has to be downloaded before you join the server, unless you turned the option off which then the image would just show up as a "green screen".

2. Sponge is made for plugins.

Sponge is basically a copy of Bukkit with original code. Most of the "objects" are representations or interfaces of the real objects. So, you don't really get to make "mods", you only get to make "scripts". That is, you make code that looks like a mod, but really just acts like an interpreted script (*cough* python *cough*) and tells Minecraft how it should handle objects. If that is the case, then make a yaml parser and Sponge scripting language for minecraft.

So yeah. Looks like SpongeAPI is going to be the successor to Bukkit! Looks promising, and I half-heartedly support it. Especially since I'm making my own API (see http://bit.ly/1I9Ev3W). I see now that the twitter page currently has 3000+ supporters (followers). If it catches enough wind, I will make an official extension to my API. I should mention though that my API will eventually contain Bukkit plugin support. Yes, you heard me right. Everyone else is just too "scared" to give Bukkit plugin support because of Wolvereness. What they don't realize is that it is under a GNU GPL license and will be used as such. I will ask Wolvereness for distribution permission when the time for Bukkit plugin support in my API comes.