So far I've seen an amazingly good response to my previous announcement, but I've also seen a lot of people with (reasonable!) questions and some thought of their own. I hope to address those here :)

"I'm A Beginner, What Does All This Actually Do?"

Basically, right now the mod community is fairly fractured - there's a huge divide between client mods and server mods, and getting these mods themselves to talk with eachother isn't so simple. We at Bukkit partnered with Mojang to introduce a new official system that should help alleviate the pressure on this, and make things easier for everyone involved. You can now efficiently talk to a client mod from the server, or vice verca, without having to worry about compatibility issues or conflicts or bandwidth or anything like that. It's all so very easy.

If you want this even simpler and a real world example of it all, think of Bukkit server plugins communicating effectively with MCP client mods. Before, this was a pain. Now, it should be very simple :)

What The System Is

The new system is a tool. It's something to use in the background and just forget about it. It's something for mods to implement silently, and it will immediately grant them 100% protection from now until the future against any conflicts on a network level. You're guaranteed that they will never interfere with the client/server if it's running something else, and that other mods will never interfere with your mod in return. You're safe in knowing that it's efficient, and you'll never waste a single byte sending data to someone who doesn't know what to do with it.

What The System Is Not

It's not a replacement ...

Some keen eyed developers may have noticed that there's a new packet in Minecraft 1.1, with no purpose or usage anywhere in the codebase. You may be wondering why this was added, and what use it could possibly have. You may also be wondering who cares, and why you have this page open. I'm here to answer all of these questions in a nice little (disclaimer: may not be little) blog post!

Update: See the FAQ on this over here! Now with simple questions like "but what does this actually mean?"

Backstory

We did some thinking a while back, about how the state of client mods and server mods for minecraft isn't really what it could be. There's so many problems with conflicts and one mod causing a bug in another and so forth, that it's really harming the potential of Minecraft modding in general. While we by no means think that we can solve this, we did start hypothesizing ways that could at least improve how mods play together, and try to make things a nicer experience for everyone - the users, the client modders, and the server modders. Most importantly, those who fit in all of the above!

One of the biggest issues with client and server modding is that having both can be hell for your users. If you have a server mod that needs a client mod, if a user without the client mod tries to join then they'll crash with seemingly no cause. Ditto for users with client mods joining a server and crashing themselves, because the server mod isn't compatible with that client mod.

Honestly, this whole thing is a mess. I'm sure most people will agree with me here. There are attempted workarounds, sure, but ...

Bukkit has recently hit its milestole 1,000th build on the 17th. The commit that brought it up to this lovely number was my new Permission system! This marks a pretty big week for Bukkit.

I've decided to look into making a small video tutorial series on how to make simple Bukkit plugins that actually do stuff, and see if I can clear up some mysteries surrounding some methods whilst I'm at it. I might not actually pull this off and will give up next week, but I'll certainly give it my best shot.

To aid in making plugins, I've created a small tool which I'm dubbing The Pluginator. Simply enter a few details about your soon-to-be plugin, and it'll create the basic structure for your plugin (it compiles and everything!). No more worrying about the messy stuff, and you can now jump straight into the code within seconds.

I'll be expanding on my toolset soon by adding something to edit Permissions and Commands, but I'll come back to them later. Planning first!