Minecraft developers Mojang will apparently be folding in four of the main developers of Bukkit to their team, and incorporating the software as the official Minecraft server mod tool.
The news was relayed by Bukkit team member Warren Loo, aka EvilSeth, who announced: ”When discussing the possibility of a modding API (application programming interface) publicly, Mojang was concerned that they would be unable to provide the community with a suitable and powerful enough solution and we honestly feel that our experience building Bukkit will help them do so. Thanks to our work with Bukkit, we have a years worth of experience, failures and lessons to help us develop a proper modding API and intend to do whatever it takes to produce one that satisfies the needs of the community. Now that we have an opportunity to design the official Minecraft API, we intend to make it a suitable replacement for Bukkit, if not a significantly better one, while bukkit.org will remain a community for modders for the foreseeable future.”
Mojang lead developer Jens Bergensten explained why the studio chose Bukkit over other server mod software: ”Many of you may ask why we decided to work with bukkit instead of other Minecraft teams, such as Spout or Forge. The reason is that we want more than just modding, and these guys have always had server admins in mind when developing their additions to the game. We hope that this will help the quality of Minecraft multi-player to improve, both for large and private family servers, while still being able to add fun stuff for the bigger audience.”
The process won’t be instantaneous, of course. “The plan is to build a fresh server API, and then extend it to support client-side modding (in one way or another). We will try to make it easy for bukkit users to convert if they wish to do so, but backwards compatibility is not guaranteed,” warned Loo, “We will, however, help bukkit to be compatible with 1.2, to avoid having a long gap while you wait for the official Minecraft server to catch up.”
With the improvement of the API, Minecraft users should find that their server support will be stronger than ever, especially with the admin tools included with Bukkit.