Has anyone thought about making a page similar to Bukkit’s dl.bukkit.org/craftbukkit and dl.bukkit.org/bukkit? I know someone recently suggested a uniform nav bar, I don’t suppose one of the buttons could be “Download” and from there point to “For Servers” and “For Developers”? I think if we stop throwing around “implementation” and “API” maybe people who don’t understand how those two apply to each other will be a little less misguided. I get how on the development side of things it makes sense and eliminates confusion, but a server owner fresh from Bukkit or Spigot is gonna think “what’s an implementation I just want a Craftbukkit jar”.
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I personally don’t think we should easily offer an API download - people should be encouraged to use Maven at the very least. Otherwise they won’t be keeping up to date with builds etc. Maven is relatively easy to use (you can quite easily change a few things in a template and be done). It also gets rid of most “Works on my machine” problems.
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I use Maven myself. So why couldn’t the API page be split, left side instructions for Maven, right side jar downloads?
Didn’t think to check that category… Good to know.
Im gonna put this here so I won’t necro that other thread.
@ZephireNZ I think it will be worth having an API download page once the implementation comes out because many people learn Java for the sole purpose of making plugins and after going through all the tutorials then coming here and hearing that they need to learn how to use maven, I imagine they might just break down crying. Maven can be a bit daunting for people new to programming. It may seem simple to you right now but it has many facets and can be overwhelming for some. Experienced programmers can use maven to get the API but it should definitely still exist on a downloads page.
As far as I know we do have some CI (Jenkins) setup but it is for internal purposes. We do have plans in the works for public downloads however 
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Even a page that says “The Sponge server isn’t ready for download, “yet”…” Is better than nothing.
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When we are ready for releases (read this as we aren’t ready now so don’t ask!), we will have API downloads available on github/jenkins and potentially on the website that points to jenkins. Downloads for the implementation will be streamlined. We have discussed learning from what has worked best in different communities for different types of software. We will be using an installer for Sponge to handle dependencies and set everything up. People from Forge/Cauldron/Liteloader will know what this is like. You will need to install the server before being able to run it. Subsequent updates should be able to have drop in sponge jars, but we don’t have all of these details worked out yet. Take all of this as my best guess. More information will be clear moving forward. But there will be a dedicated place for this in a very obvious place so that people can get to them as simply as possible.
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