Certain tasks are impossible to perform with the standard Bukkit API, and may require working with and even modify Minecraft directly. A common technique is to modify incoming and outgoing packets, or inject custom packets into the stream. This is quite cumbersome to do, however, and most implementations will break as soon as a new version of Minecraft has been released, mostly due to obfuscation.
Critically, different plugins that use this approach may hook into the same classes, with unpredictable outcomes. More than often this causes plugins to crash, but it may also lead to more subtle bugs.
The mod and its source code can be found on Bukkit Dev or Github