Have a look at Spout[0]. Its an open source server that generalizes the minecraft concept. They are actually supporting 'minecraft' as a plugin called vanilla

Have a look at Spout[0]. Its an open source server that generalizes the minecraft concept. They are actually supporting 'minecraft' as a plugin called vanilla which communicates with the stock minecraft client. They also have an improved client which is currently a modded minecraft client but I believe the eventual plan it rewrite the client from scratch also. [0]http://www.spout.org http://www.spout.org and https://github.com/SpoutDev https://github.com/SpoutDev