What is CraftBook?

CraftBook is a modification to servers for the game Minecraft which provides a large number of new features and mechanisms unavailable in the native game.

At heart, CraftBook offers the power to construct active entities out of patterns of lesser parts, taking the core values of creativity and artistry that attract users to Minecraft and amplifying them by bringing life to otherwise static creations.

Who cares?

Anyone wanting to enhance their experience with Minecraft or who is looking for something totally new to add to their toolkit for creativity ought to check CraftBook out.

It's honestly hard to be certain what the exact scale of usage is, since it's rather tough to see how many users are on servers that use this mod. Still, if some YouTube video play counts are any indication, we've probably got somewhere in the ballpark of a hundred thousand engaged users. Github shows something just above 75 thousand downloads for the latest release, though I'm inclined to suspect even more people download the dev builds from other more up-to-date servers that hold the nightly builds. There's 47 forks on Github at the time of writing -- a pleasantly vibrant community. CraftBook even has a facebook page, perhaps somewhat egregiously.

What does this hash@exultant.us bloke have to do with it?

I'm responsible for the core event dispatching for the vehicle modification component of CraftBook, manifested most of the specific vehicle interaction mechanisms of the present version, contributed a significant part of the design pattern behind central abstractions of other major components, and I also occasionally drop new components into the related plugin WorldEdit. When availability permits, I provide front-line help and support via the IRC and other channels. Of course, the originating and leading force behind these plugins is the talented sk89q, and there's tons of other invaluable contributors (I'll punt to the wiki and the github commit logs instead of trying to enumerate them all here, though).

What's it like coding for that community?

Coding for the Bukkit platform can be something of a challenge. On one hand, it provides a fairly well designed and flexible event system that does a pretty solid job of coordinating a highly diverse community of plugins and modifications. On the other hand it's still definitely a moving target to code to (it's technically not even considered to be out of alpha yet) and can be full of unexpected parity errors between expected behavior, the documentation, and actual behaviour. Nonetheless, it's highly enjoyable to work on projects with such visible progress.