Heya, This ISN'T any official announcement that EMC will be upgrading but Spigot 1.8 has been released! http://www.spigotmc.org/threads/bukkit-craftbukkit-spigot-1-8.36598/ I've been messing around with it and was also on the testing team before it's release and it's pretty stable. Many plugins should easily work with it however any that use NMS (net.minecraft.server) code. While EMC won't be upgrading to this because of any bugs that may have gone unnoticed and the fact the plugins EMC run will need updating, especially ChestShop, Dynmap and Residence as there are new blocks, mobs and features added in. Anyways - this is a good sign and hopefully in a short period of time we should be going 1.8. PS: I know Aikar WAS working on Sponge and that he likes it but currently Sponge has no 1.8 release and there is a lot of uncertainty to when it will be released and how it will work as it requires Forge to run. Thankies
Well, part 1 is over with. The main source code of plug-ins is here. Now comes part 2: getting EMC's staff to update to 1.8 through spigot. Minecraft 1.8.1 isn't a problem for servers since it's compatible with 1.8 servers.
Actually, Aikar has recently stated that Sponge will not be the update path for EMC. He has been working with this Spigot update as the plan since they announced it would actually happen. Yes, it will take a little bit of time to update totally to all 1.8 features, but the stated plan is to pull code into EMC existing server code base in pieces (because not just our plugins are custom). Depending on how well that process goes, only time will tell. EMC is already friendly with the Spigot code features, so hopefully no major delays remain.