Hi, I am new to the forum and the Sponge project. I heard that you can now create a server-side only mod. Then I don’t know what kind of advantages that Sponge plugins have over server-side mods. Is the development of Sponge plugins easier compare to that of mods? I read somewhere that sponge plugin didn’t need to be updated as Sponge gets updated to work with newer versions of Minecraft. That sounds like an advantage. How about the performance? Thank you for your inputs in advance
Sponge is like bukkit in the respect that it has plugins and plugins only.
As for sponge plugins vs forge server side only mods. If you search for forge mods like that they are normally few and far between and the ones you do find are normally very limited in what you can do (there are exceptions). While sponge plugins. Theres many to choose from and all in one place.
Sponge uses API versions and this API version changes based on how big the Minecraft changes are. So a minecraft update from 1.11.1 to 1.11.2 was not a big update feature wise (i think it just did bug fixes) so the API did not change.
The API version is what plugins use. So if you load sponge api 7.0.0 you can only use Sponge plugins that support API 7.0.0. (If you have a sponge version using 7.1 you can run 7.0 plugins but thats by the by).
Thats the brief overview. There are others such as sponge has all the code to make it so plugins are widely compatible with other forge mods (so plugins can interact with forge mobs and blocks) while a server side mod would need to hard code it in.
As for working with forge and sponge for development. I personally came from bukkit and sponge was just a natural change for me with not much of a learning curve. However when i tried learning forge there was a greater learning curve and I ended up giving up. So I personally prefer Sponge. But you were going to get a biased opinion considered you posted on the sponge forums 
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Thank you for the information. I understand now that Sponge plugins utilize Sponge APIs. I like that they can work with forge mods. I mostly wanted to know if Sponge was still very alive and a good platform to learn. It sounds it is. 
Oh yeah. It is very alive. 3 months ago (or so) they released the full version of API 7 and the development builds for API 7.1.0 (Still Minecraft 1.12.2) are rolling out every day. You can also see changes happening to API 8 (Minecraft 1.13) occuring so when minecraft releases 1.13 api will hopefully be not too far behind (im not in the know on release dates of minecraft 1.13 or Sponge, so predictions for api 8 will probably not be accurate).
As for people developing plugins, I see new plugins popup at least once every 3 days. And every day there are plenty of post.