Hello all! Currently in the very early stages of planning a new Minecraft server with a few friends. Several of us are coming off of a year long hiatus after we got burnt by our original server owner taking the money from our initial opening and running. That being said, I’ve had very little experience with Minecraft server administration for almost a year now. Before then, I used to work on servers here and there assisting with plugin management and even providing specifics for plugin development. So, there’s of my group’s background.
During the hiatus, I did hear about the calamity with Bukkit, and its slow downfall ever since. So, the question is what platform I should start the server on, and how soon should I plan for a transition to what I would guess be Sponge on its official stable release? I’m assuming most people are currently running Spigot, and considering this is the forums for Sponge Project, a good majority of server admins here plan to eventually transition. While I know an exact date cannot be promised for Sponge’s release, is there a potential window determined so I could plan a safe transition to the new platform in advance for this new server? In addition to this, I’ve heard of a Sponge/Bukkit API… Could anyone care to elaborate for me? Really, I’m just trying to catch up on all of the necessary information for server administrators that I have lost out on over the last year. For any help, thanks in advance!
P.S. Being a Computer Science major, I’ve also begun to dabble in Java. Which platform (Bukkit/Spigot or Sponge) should I direct my attention to as far as creating custom plugins go?
This is the same as asking on a Microsoft support forum if you should use Windows or Linux.
Just a heads up, information you get on a product forum about the said product might be based. Best would be to either ask this question on spigot as well and compare your responses on both threads or ask on a non-baised forum, which might be difficult in this case.
It was my understanding that Sponge is a project in the works to replace Bukkit and Spigot? Or is Spigot here to stay? I thought Spigot was just around for the time being until Sponge’s release.
Pretty sure that the spigot folks will keep pushing the boulder uphill as long as the word “plugin” remains synonymous with “bukkit” for >45% of the population.
I am not in the staff group of Spigot so I cannot say anything for sure but to my knowledge both projects are here to stay. Neither Spigot nor Sponge have shown any signs of slow-down, rather the opposite.
Sponge was never (to my understanding) supposed to surpass Spigot, it was meant to take over after the Bukkit incident a while back. As Bukkit was falling downhill many people also thought that Spigot would end as well but after loads of work Spigot rewrote their building process and managed to continue operating legally even with the DMCA in place.
Neat! Thanks for the info. Wasn’t really sure how Spigot was even continuing. That being said, right now, is Spigot more effective and stable than Sponge? Like, how developmental is Sponge still?
It is very much in development. The API is still being changed right now, and builds breaking are frequent. However, I think the API is much more robust than Bukkit’s, and so if I were you I would probably start organizing your server/writing plugins at your leisure, knowing that the API could change (admittedly, there are not many major API changes anymore)
Depends on what you want to do. Do you consider to create features that require a client mod? Then, Sponge is the way to go. If not, both have positive and negative aspects. The biggest problem with Sponge is that
is something you’ll hear very often for a long time.
If you don’t want client mods: Have a look at the plugins which are available. Bukkit is around for 4 1/2 years. You’ll find plugins for nearly everything and as a developer, it shouldn’t be such a pain to update one or two yourself if they are outdated. Do you need many complex plugins that won’t be ported to Sponge? If yes, I recommend CraftBukkit. If no, there’s no right and no wrong.
Myself, I’m member of a server team that uses CraftBukkit (or CraftBukkit mods) since 2011 (when Bukkit was created) and it has always been reliable and I can’t complain. For us, it’s impossible to switch because there are so many Bukkit plugins we wrote ourselves and Pore (Sponge plugin that adds support for Bukkit plugins) will never be able to handle them because they need the net.minecraft.server / org.bukkit.craftbukkit internals that are not included in the API.
As a rule of thumb, if you’re looking to get a server up now, don’t use Sponge. I will not however, recommend any of the other Bukkit derivatives as a long-term solution, given the legal/moral conundrum it’s facing. Sponge, while completely amazeballs, is not a practical solution for production servers (and won’t be for a while).
As a rule of thumb, if you’re looking to get a server up now, don’t use Sponge.
Yeah, that’s what it’s been looking like, I’m considering getting a VPS,it will probably end up running the main server on it, and one or two small 5-man test servers, one running a near-clone of the main server, and the other running Sponge, just so I can pop in and see what it’s looking like here and there.