New Core Developer

I’m happy to announce that @Cybermaxke is formally joining the Sponge Team as our newest Core Developer! His main focus will be geared towards the Data API and it’s implementations, as many plugin developers know, it has a lot of work going towards improving usability and functionality. As such, he will be the overall architect of Data moving forward. Please welcome him to his new post.

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Nice, but I think that one of the major problem of Sponge is the number of plugins… :confused:

Thats sadly not sponges fault but more the plugin developers of Sponge.

I personally came to sponge from the Bukkit 1.8 DMCA and I have attempted to get developers I have collaborated to port over their plugins to the sponge API, however due to my lack of ability to motivate people, or their stubbonness (ill let you deside). They didnt want to port there huge plugins over to another API and then need to support both a Bukkit and Sponge version (which is fair enough).
As for new plugins, they never tried Sponge API and didn’t want to learn a new API when they are perfectly happy with the Bukkit API and having to use NMS and update their code after every Release of Minecraft

Now to be fair, Sponge has had more major API versions than MC versions - so that hasn’t been fully realised yet. Though plugins have indeed faired better of late.

The trouble is sadly cyclic - plugin developers develop for what has the market share, and administrators go where is known and supported (as in, with plentiful plugins and experienced devs they can hire).

This is why in retrospect designing the ecosystem to support modded servers was so novel, Sponge is very popular amongst modded servers - whereas its penetrated the vanilla market much less.

However, this also contributes towards the plugin problems - modded servers are more frequently ran by more knowledgeable people - running custom plugins more often than not in my experience.

Sponge has also existed as long as Bukkit had (pre-DMCA), and still doesn’t have its plugin repository up-to-spec to deprecate forums yet… Though the wheels are in motion for this, and the Sponge guidelines often preclude inexperienced developers from publishing (signing, etc).