This guy, DoingItWell has modded the 1.8 vanilla server to support plugins. He already has stable builds and an impressive plugin API + minimal bukkit plugin support. It also includes a basic economy, essentials and antiCheat. I’ll just leave this for general discussion here:
[http://www.project-rainbow.org/][1]
My questions are:
I’m eager to hear your thoughts on this. 
[1]: http://www.project-rainbow.org/
hmm seems like a small community but I like the fact that they actually have downloads out. Personally im not too sure who will win. After the “Great fall” of bukkit seems like a lot of these “smaller communities” are noticed. Very interested to see how this will play out.
Personally am a Sponge support though <3
Hrmm… Interesting. Certainly has more substance than another supposed project (*cough* husk *cough*).
I believe that, in the long run, sponge will be bigger and better. It has the most support behind it, and it has the most traction. Not to mention the developers working on it.
Not sure if it is 1.8, just ran it and in the log it says
Rainbow Mod v27: Simulating version 1.8, MC Ver #47
It is! Here’s a screen that demonstrates that it’s not just a protocol hack and all the 1.8 features, blocks and mobs work:
I think it may have some legal issues, it distributes the Minecraft binaries inside the jar
It definitely does. And it’s also affected by the EULA, you have to agree to it the first time the server is starting.
Ok, where are the packages ?
I still bet my money on sponge thought. Even without a working release.
Sponge has forge support. And thats all I need.
Wait until you look at PluginBase
I don’t know what event handling is, but man, this is amazing.
http://weknowgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/fuck-this-im-out-llama.gif
So this server distribution has:
EDIT: Sponge won 
A handful of devs at best, dubious legal status etc
No thank you
Where are all these small projects coming from?? Lol, chances are this isn’t going to be the last one we will see before sponge is out, not by a long shot.
Does not look legal. If you’re going to use the 1.8 jar and not make something from the ground up, do what forge does and inject code into it. Also, that event system is very primitive (looks like an override based one?). Look into annotation based event systems, it’s probably worth your while to create; if your code is open sourced then I can possibly assist you with this.
Just to make this clear: I’m not part of Rainbow, i just wanted to share the link.
In my opinion Sponge has no real competition. These Sponge vs X threads are pretty pointless.
We have the community and the highly knowledgeable devs (Not saying others wont have good devs… just I believe Sponge’s to be more suited to the task). Even if we don’t have downloads out yet, I personally think that works better in Sponge’s favour as it shows we aren’t putting out any half arsed content. What Sponge will deliver will hopefully be a quality API which functions as intended. The time it takes is partially irrelevant (within reason)
I can’t see much standing up to Sponge in the grand scheme of things.
Sponge might have a great community, but what else ? Sure sk89q post some impressive stuff about how great sponge is going to be, but so far we haven’t seen much. The github haven’t been updated for days…
I’m not convinced that sponge is going to be the best. But we’ll see.
Project rainbow, might have a website that looks like something from the 90’s but at least he managed to create something that works. Great work
The Sponge community don’t shun competition, as was made clear with the Husk topic, but understand the reason most of us are here is because Bukkit or some fork of Bukkit was shut down. Most of us probably won’t trust Rainbow to be very long-lived because it looks to be doing something similar to what Bukkit did.
It’s been noted that the developers actually have lives. Surprising, isn’t it? On top of that, it’s not necessary for them to update daily, or by any fixed schedule. They can update just as much over a longer period without committing it to GitHub.
No need to get defensive on the sponge teams behalf. I wouldn’t have the time to commit to a project of this size, so I get that. But I’m saying that project rainbow actually made something that can be used. Where I’m not convinced that Sponge will be ready anytime soon.