Sounds good ... as you may remember when you started to talk about
Blocks in Ghent we started talking about JMX then as well. It may not
have everything you want or need, but it does have some good points and
a basic lifecycle. I believe that MX4J (http://mx4j.sourceforge.net/)
is released under an Apache license and is also being used in Geronimo.
I think it would be worth examining it as a piece of the Core needed
for blocks.
I can say that in a previous commercial endeavour I used JMX as the
core to manage all of the component loading, monitoring and
distribution.
I'm willing to pitch in here ... and after March 29th able to as well.
Cheers,
Thor HW