This time last year, the SpongePowered Project began from the seed of #NextStep on Espernet. That tiny seed grew to become the grand architecture of the Sponge Project we know today. We’re very thankful to the community for working with us over the past year to create this awesome project!
To give you the best possible overview, we’ve combined every project into a single visualisation:
[spoiler=Retrospective]
September 7: IRC Channel and FAQ: Sponge FAQ - v1
September 8: First Commit - Initial commit · SpongePowered/Sponge@9b1d2c8 · GitHub
September 10: Welcome to Sponge! - Welcome to Sponge!
September 11: First Annoucement - Status update - 11 September, 2014
September 16: Second Announcement - Status update - 16 September, 2014
November 12: A Wiki is Born - Status Update - 12 November, 2014
November 30: API 1.0 - Status Update - API Release Edition (Not the usable server)
January 23: State of Sponge I - State of Sponge 25/01/2015
February 28: State of Sponge II - State of Sponge II- 28/02/2015
April 21: API 2.0 - SpongeAPI Rev. 2
April 26: State of Sponge III - State of Sponge III - April 2015
June 6: State of Sponge IV - State of Sponge IV
July 5-6: Sponge @ Minecon - Sponge at Minecon 2015 - The Photos
July 25th: State of Sponge V - Status Update - BlockJam Edition
The SpongeDocs team have also been working on the Official History for those who would like to take a look.
[/spoiler]
Development Update - Courtesy of @Zidane
Gource Extravaganza!
SpongeAPI
SpongeForge
SpongeVanilla
SpongeCommon
Great Event Refactor
As you can see above, it’s been a busy month (and year for that matter). What started with @wizjany giving us feedback on our lousy event names (which I won’t argue on), ended up in one of the largest refactor branches in the project’s history. What started as a one man project by @Zidane ended up in a collaboration by many of us and equally as much headache and frustration on our overall direction. The decisions we’ve made regarding the design of the event system will have the longest effect on how the API is used and we’re proud of what we’ve put out the door.
3.0 SNAPSHOT, Java 8, and You
Obviously we’ve broken a thing or three in 2.1-SNAPSHOT which the API is currently at. Starting with the official transition to a requirement of Java 8, we’ll be also bumping the API revision. We’ll remove all old builds as well but we’ll give everyone a good month’s grace period to update plugins for the change. Server admins, start updating your servers (or have your hosting providers do so).
SpongeVanilla Dev Builds and SpongeForge Beta Release
Just as soon as @lukegb gets it up, I’m happy to finally announce SpongeVanilla dev builds. I feel she is stable enough so give it a whirl and let me know your thoughts.
Setup: https://docs.spongepowered.org/en/server/getting-started/installation.html
Some may be wondering “You’ve got SpongeForge and Forge 1.8 takes Vanilla clients, what does SpongeVanilla offer me?”. SpongeVanilla is meant to be the cleanest implementation possible of SpongeAPI on Minecraft itself. It contains none of Forge’s capabilities to load mods which is both a benefit and a detriment. While SpongeVanilla loses mods, it remains slim and true to the Vanilla experience. If you feel Forge isn’t for you, don’t miss out on Sponge…SpongeVanilla is for you :).
Switching gears now, SpongeForge has been available for dev builds for a while and the feedback we’ve gotten has been amazing. @blood and crew have worked tirelessly on the product and the results are starting to show. I’m happy to announce that we are prepping for entering beta phase of SpongeForge. Internally, we have a series of tasks that herald the coming of it and some of those are focused on WorldGuard requirements such as:
- Implementing events on a priority basis
- Implementing data on a priority basis Inventory implementation
- Add Changelogs to downloads page Complete the rename process of Sponge → SpongeForge (and all that entails)
- Transition to Java 8 (not a requirement but a priority of ours going forward)
- Upgrade to Forge’s latest offering Perform
- Sponge-Only/Sponge-With-Plugins testing
As it stands, it’s a lengthy list but @blood is making serious headway on Sponge’s end and I’ll assist with anything that is common (all of the data) as that benefits both implementations. While we never give ETAs, I’ll go ahead and make the promise of entering beta phase by Christmas 2015.
Great, how can I help you fulfill your promise?
While the usual docs shoutout can be pasted here verbatim, we need people to tackle and complete each data manipulator. If you are also willing (and, in SpongeForge’s case, brave), we seriously need help with getting all of the events firing. Talk to @gabizou to see what you can do for data or @Zidane / @blood on what to do for events. Lastly, we’ll be reaching out to have people do more intricate testing of it so be on the lookout for future posts.
Docs Update
After some general streamlining (thanks @Tzk), we now have room for a heap of new things to be added. This includes the recent Event Refactoring, transition to Java 8 (when it hits the repo), and many more. We’re also trying to make it easier for contributors to help SpongeDevs write DataManipulators - as soon as we finish the doc explaining how.
Many thanks to @Zirconium for keeping things ticking along, reviewing, and generally being nice. Sadly, the Data API docs (WIP) were a casualty of the massive changes (sorry, @Saladoc). We’ll need to start again with Data docs using the restructured Data 2.0 API.
There has been much useful feedback from the regular Docs Quiz; thank you to everyone who has provided grist for the mill. We hope to address many of the things discussed there soon, maybe even including the fabled changelog.
Some unused and unloved languages were trimmed from Crowdin, and in a bizarre twist, UK English has been added for the linguistic purists. We are hoping to get English set as the default language for SpongeDocs soon. May the FLARD be with you.
SpongeDocs [Gource]
State of Sponge VI
State of Sponge VI will be held at 21:00 UTC on Saturday 26th September. You can check your local time here: http://everytimezone.com/#2015-9-26,540,cn3
As always, we will be having a Q&A session, be sure to post any questions you have below, or tweet them with the hashtag #StateOfSponge, the more questions you have, the better! We will also be running a demo server with plenty of plugins for everyone to play around on, we’d love people to join us and help test everything. We hope to see you there!
Join us at: Twitch
Final Thoughts
I must say, our first year has been one wild ride. We’ve had our ups, downs, and everything in-between. We’ve hit many roadblocks yet the wheels keep on turning. We hit slow periods just to fire back with a month like August. While some people have since departed, others have hopped aboard and we’ve never been better. I could not be more proud of what this team has accomplished over the past year nor more thankful of the wonderful community that has stepped up to give us its’ support. I look forward to the upcoming year and beyond.
I got my anniversary Badge! 
