Mojang hires Bukkit server-mod team to make official Minecraft API

Mojang has hired the server-mod making Bukkit team to help build an official API (application programming interface) for the Minecraft community.

"Today we can announce that the four main developers of Bukkit - a community-based Minecraft server implementation - have joined ranks with Mojang to bring you the same flexibility and versatility to the official Minecraft server." announced lead Minecraft developer and game designer Jens Bergensten on the Mojang website.

"The four - Warren Loo, Erik Broes, Nathan Adams and Nathan Gilbert - will work on improving both the server and the client to offer better official support for larger servers and server modifications.

"The plan is to build a fresh server API, and then extend it to support client-side modding (in one way or another)."

Bergensten outlined that Mojang will try and make it "easy" for Bukkit users to convert, but shared that backwards compatibility "is not guaranteed". Bukkit will be compatible with Minecraft 1.2.

Bukkit team member Warren Loo announced the news on the Bukkit website, in a long post about the open source project's history.

"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. "

Warren Loo, Bukkit team member

"I am extremely pleased and proud to announce that, as of today, the Bukkit team has joined Mojang," a snippet from Loo's post read.

"When discussing the possibility of a modding API publicly, Mojang was concerned it would be unable to provide the community with a suitable and powerful enough solution, and we honestly feel 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."