The news hit not long ago that the main Bukkit staff, the people making the Minecraft server software allowing mods, will be joining Mojang by becoming full-fledge employees!

This sounds like a very good thing to me as a server admin. One of the main weaknesses of the Bukkit project is the need for them to rewrite pretty much the entire thing for every game release. Now that they'll be working on an official, integrated API, this means that future Minecraft server and client updates will have all the required code included from day one. Hopefully, this will eliminate most of the need to wait after each client update until the server stuff catches up! There might be a troublesome adaptation required in-between, but once everyone is on the other side, I expect some smoother sailing. Besides, this is stuff for the server admins to worry about.

I've been following some of those people since I started our server, and I believe they're competent and full of good ideas. I, for one, welcome this change with open arms!

The first positive changes have been coming in for a few weeks now!

Compared to what I first believed, they're also taking care of bugs and limitations on the client too. I was happy to see that 1.2.4, released today, includes many improvements to the in-game chat: history using the up/down arrow keys has been added, URLs have become clickable, and all kind of neat things like that. We finally have a decent chat system.

As a further proof of this work, one of the devs changed the behavior of tamed cats: those in your home will now jump on beds and chests from time to time, preventing you from using them until you shoo them away!